


A White Meadow Stained Red

by just_another_outcast



Category: Prodigal Son (TV 2019)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Creepy, Gen, Ghosts, Gothic, Haunted Houses, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, Malcolm Bright Gets a Hug, Malcolm Bright Needs a Hug, Malcolm Bright Whump, Papa Gil, Paranormal, Protective Dani Powell, Protective Gil Arroyo, Protective JT Tarmel, Supernatural Elements, Suspense, brief appearances made by Martin and Jessica, but not all of your questions will be answered, everything ends up okay, it's still a happy ending, lots of hugs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:15:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 41,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27180973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/just_another_outcast/pseuds/just_another_outcast
Summary: Malcolm has never met his great uncle Francis Whitly.  In fact, he didn't even know the man existed until he gets a phone call from the executor of the man's estate.  Francis has died, leaving absolutely everything to Malcolm.  The estate itself is a haunting yet beautiful Gothic mansion, hiding very real skeletons in its closets and ghosts in its halls.  When the team goes with Malcolm to the mansion to aid him in following the eerie instructions left in Francis' will, they find themselves trapped on the property, at the mercy of the house's dangerous secrets.  Their only task ends up being a tall order: just survive the night.  Malcolm has been used to his past coming back to haunt him for years, but this is just a bit too literal.
Relationships: Gil Arroyo & Malcolm Bright, Malcolm Bright & Dani Powell, Malcolm Bright & JT Tarmel
Comments: 15
Kudos: 37
Collections: Prodigal Son Big Bang 2020 - Monday Posts





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sop12345d](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sop12345d/gifts).



> I have loved writing this. It was a fantastic experience for me to stretch my skills as a writer, and I hope you love reading it as much as I loved writing it :)
> 
> Special thanks to [my incredible beta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sop12345d/pseuds/Sop12345d) for all of her hard work. She also made some truly incredible fan art to go along with this fic, which can be found [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27063238) :)

_The floorboards underneath the carpet creaked as Malcolm raced down the hallway, but he didn’t pay them any mind like he had before. Malcolm dared a glance behind him, and sighed in relief upon realizing that the spectre was gone. But that didn’t mean he was out of the woods. He still needed to find his team before it was too late. He was supposed to do this alone, but he hadn’t listened, and now he was being punished. Gil and Dani and JT were being punished._

_Malcolm took a deep breath as he turned around and looked down the never-ending hallway. But what was that at the far side? He squinted as he tried to focus on the form on the other end. Was the apparition back? Malcolm heard a dark chuckle come from all around him, distracting him from the barely visible ghost. He stood straight back up and tried to look around, but he was alone._

_The sudden feeling of ice at his back had Malcolm turning around again, coming face to face with the very thing that had sent him running in the first place._

“I see the bad moon a-rising.”

Malcolm’s eyes shot open at the familiar sound of his radio going off, as it did every morning as his alarm.

“I see trouble on the way.”

The radio continued to play as Malcolm sat up and unclipped his restraints, his bizarre dream already fading in his mind. He’d watched _The Shining_ the night before, and that, along with his never stable psyche, was enough to dismiss the dream fairly quickly.

“Don’t go around tonight

Well it’s bound to take your life

There’s a bad moon on the rise.”

Malcolm rolled his eyes at the song and stood to go turn it off. He’d never been a big fan of Creedence Clearwater Revival anyway. The radio was silenced with a simple flick of the off switch, and Sunshine’s cheerful singing quickly replaced it. Her song was a much happier one, bringing a genuine smile to Malcolm’s face.

“Good morning, girl,” he cheerfully greeted. She continued to sing as Malcolm took his meds like popcorn and refilled Sunshine’s food and water. The sun was shining through his windows in small patches, the dark clouds covering up most of its rays. It looked every bit like it was going to rain. With how unearthly hot it had been that week, Malcolm didn’t mind that much. It would be humid, but at least the rain would cool the city down a bit.

The harsh sound of his phone vibrating against the countertop stole Malcolm’s attention. He glanced down at it as Sunshine continued to sing. It wasn’t a number he had in his contacts or even recognized, with an area code from north of the city. After hesitating for a moment, Malcolm swiped the phone from the counter and answered it.

“Hello?”

“Malcolm Whi- Bright, I presume?” an aristocratic male voice asked him. Malcolm’s brows furrowed together even more at the almost-use of his family name.

“Yes, I’m Malcolm Bright,” he carefully responded. He noticed that Sunshine had stopped singing, likely having picked up on the shift in the room’s atmosphere, the smart girl she was.

“Good, I am Mr. Hugh Caswell. I work for the late Francis Whitly, and I regret to inform you that your great uncle has passed on,” the man said.

“Wait, who?” Malcolm interrupted. He sat down at the barstool, his confusion only growing. “I don’t have a great uncle.” At least not one that had been alive in the current century.

“I beg your pardon, sir, but Francis Whitly was, in fact, your great uncle. He was the brother of Martin Whitly’s father. Martin himself spent a fair amount of time at the estate as a child,” Caswell claimed.

Malcolm was speechless. His father had always claimed to be the only child of an only child. Malcolm had never even considered that Dr. Whitly could’ve been lying about that as well.

“The fact of the matter is, Francis has passed on, and he’s left everything to you. I am in the process of transferring all of his assets to your possession.”

“Wait, I didn’t even know I had a great uncle, much less ever met him. How can I be the sole beneficiary?” he asked. There had to be some mistake, or JT had somehow concocted an elaborate prank, or something.

“I’m sorry, sir, I cannot yet give you the answers you require. But you may come to the estate and see all that you have now acquired, and what you must undertake in order to acquire the rest. The mansion is yours now, after all.”

“There’s a mansion?” Everything just continued to grow more and more strange.

“Yes, sir. The Whitly Estate, totaling roughly 15,000 square feet, sits on ten acres of land, about an hour’s drive north of the city. It has more rooms than one person could ever need, and even a moat around the property’s edge. I do encourage you, as the estate’s new owner, to come see your property and discuss with me the rest of your new assets. The sooner, the better,” he said.

Malcolm sighed. What was he supposed to do with all of that? He cursed his father once again, this time for hiding an entire mansion from their family. He would have to bring it up with him before he went to see the estate.

“I can come by later today,” Malcolm finally said. They just closed a case two days earlier, so all he would be missing out on was paperwork. He was sure Gil would understand. Maybe he could even get Gil to come with him. That would certainly make everything a bit easier.

“Excellent, Mr. Bright,” Caswell said. “I shall send you the address, and the code for the gate. Good day to you, sir.”

Before Malcolm could reply, Caswell hung up, leaving Malcolm with many more questions than answers. Who even spoke like Caswell did? The man was exceedingly formal, speaking much more like Alfred from Batman than any hired help that Malcolm had ever known. Even Adolpho wasn’t so formal, when he even spoke at all - he was a man of very few words.

A moment later, his phone buzzed again, this time with a text message coming from that same number. Just as Caswell said, it was an address and a gate code. Malcolm put the address into Google Earth, just to be sure that it did, in fact, lead to an estate. It did. Malcolm’s jaw fell open at the estate on the screen. Hearing that the estate was 15,000 square feet was one thing, but seeing such a sprawling mansion for himself, even online, was remarkable. How had he not known about it?

Malcolm had several phone calls to make. The first was to Gil, to let him know that he wouldn’t be coming in that day. Malcolm flopped back down on his bed, his legs hanging off the side, and tapped on Gil’s number. It was the first contact on his speed dial.

“Hey, kid,” Gil quickly answered, just as he always did.

“Hey, so, a weird thing happened, and I won’t be coming in today,” he replied. Obviously, that wasn’t a good enough answer for Gil.

“What? Is everything alright?” he asked, his voice quickly taking on a serious and concerned tone.

“Yeah, I think so, but it’s really hard to explain.” Malcolm tried to think of a way to explain it all quickly and concisely while he stared up at the ceiling, but soon thought better of it. “I can meet you for coffee and try to explain, but you might want to clear your schedule.” He was hoping he could convince the man to go with him to the estate. In reality, he knew it wouldn’t take much convincing. Gil wasn’t likely to be okay with letting the one he thought of as his son go off to meet the executor of a trust of a relative that Malcolm hadn’t known existed without backup. It could all be an elaborate set up to get Malcolm to a specific place where he would then be abducted or killed. He had pissed off a lot of people in his career up to that point. A trap certainly made more sense than him being the sole beneficiary to the entire estate of a man he’d never met. Caswell had never mentioned Ainsley, and although she was currently awaiting trial and not allowed to leave the city, it didn’t make much sense that an actual relative would leave so much to Malcolm, but nothing to his sister.

“Okay, I’ll meet wherever you want,” Gil said. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yes, Gil, I’m fine,” Malcolm insisted with a smile. It was nice to have someone care about him that much, but everything really was fine - that time. “I’m not using our code word, I’m fine.” Not long after Gil had become a permanent fixture in Malcolm’s life, the cop had made Malcolm come up with a codeword for him to use if he were ever in an unsafe situation but couldn’t say so freely. That way, Gil could come up with a reason for him to leave, or show up and save the day, whichever the situation seemed to call for. Throughout Malcolm’s life, he’d used that codeword five times. This wasn’t the time when he would use it a sixth.

“Alright, good. Your favorite coffee house in an hour?” Gil confirmed.

“Make it two. I gotta stop somewhere first.”

“Okay, kid. See you then.”

“See you then,” Malcolm echoed, then hung up. The next call was to his mother. He’d decided a surprise visit to Rikers was better than simply calling and hoping he’d be allowed to speak with his father. Besides, Malcolm needed to be able to see his father’s autonomic tells, and he couldn’t do that over the phone. Hopefully, he would be allowed in to see Dr. Whitly in solitary confinement. Malcolm could always just claim it was for police business. The man had been put in solitary for his own protection, not for anything he had supposedly done, so it wasn’t as if visitors were strictly not allowed.

Dr. Whitly not being at Claremont anymore was a mixed bag. On the one hand, Rikers was where The Surgeon belonged. He had no ailment that could be treated or cured, making staying at a mental institution not only pointless, but a blatant slap in the face to the families of all of his victims. Staying at Rikers was justice, and it kept the man from calling Malcolm whenever he liked and demanding to see him. That too was a mixed bag. Malcolm knew, on all logical standpoints, that the less he saw his father, the better. But a part of him still longed to see the man, despite all the trauma and pain that Dr. Whitly continued to put into his life. Malcolm knew his relationship with his father was completely unhealthy, bordering on Stockholm Syndrome even, and yet, breaking off all contact with the man was almost as difficult as going to see him.

Malcolm shook his head and took a deep breath. That could all be dealt with at a later date. He tapped on his mother’s contact, right below Gil’s.

“Good morning, darling,” she answered after a few rings.

“Good morning, Mother,” he politely replied. Before giving her a chance to respond, he continued. “Did my father ever tell you about his uncle Francis?” he asked.

“What?”

“Did he tell you that he had an uncle, or spent time at a mansion about an hour north of the city while he grew up?” he continued.

“Uh, no, no he didn’t,” his mother answered. “Your father always told me that he was the only child of an only child. I never even met his parents. They moved to the English countryside once Martin was old enough to be on his own, and died in a car accident a few years later, not long after I met Martin. He was away for a few days for the funeral, but we weren’t serious enough at the time for me to join him.” Malcolm knew most of that. As a young child, he’d wanted to spend time with his father’s parents the same way he spent time with his mother’s, but their deaths in a car accident long before he was ever born had prevented that. His father had always said it was for the best, since he hadn’t even spoken to his parents once they moved - something about a bad relationship between them, but Malcolm was pretty sure he had his father beat on that one.

But all of that was completely unhelpful. It was what Malcolm had been told for years, and it wasn’t providing any new insight to the current situation.

“What are you even talking about? How is Martin even contacting you?” his mother asked.

“He’s not, it was from-,” Malcolm broke off, realizing that he was going to have to either attempt to explain everything to his mother, or hang up. “I got a phone call from the executor of a trust that someone claiming to be my great uncle Francis has passed away and left his entire estate to me.” He could hear his mother’s sharp intake of breath over the phone. “I’m going to speak with this man today, and I promise I’ll let you know what’s going on. I’m taking Gil with me too, so you don’t need to be worried.”

“I’m always worried about you,” she practically groaned. “Yet somehow I’m not surprised this happened. Our family does have a habit of finding ourselves in situations that others would never even dream of. This is just par for the course, I suppose.” She sighed, and Malcolm could just see her shaking her head as she poured herself a glass of bourbon, despite the early hour. “I’m glad you have the sense to take Gil with you. With everything going on with your sister, I can’t handle anything else.”

“I know, Mother,” Malcolm muttered, somewhat guiltily. He knew what happened hadn’t been his fault, but part of him still said he should’ve just killed Endicott so that Ainsley didn’t have to be the one to do it. She was the well-adjusted one. She was the one who had escaped their father’s legacy, who was living a normal life and didn’t deal with trauma and PTSD on a daily basis. That was all gone now. She had killed a man, violently. Based on what Malcolm knew of Endicott and what Ainsley had told him the man had said, it sounded enough like self defense that Malcolm wasn’t too worried about her killing again or anything like that, but there was still the legal system to worry about. Whether or not Ainsley had enough to claim self defense in a legal sense remained to be seen, but Malcolm would’ve been lying if he said he wasn’t nervous. If Malcolm had just killed Endicott himself, then Ainsley wouldn’t have to worry about any of it. She would have been fine, free to continue living her normal life. Now that was all over.

Another part of him knew he’d done the right thing for himself by not killing Endicott, by choosing to follow in the footsteps of his dad, instead of his father. He hadn’t had the time to do it, but Malcolm had been resolved to go about it legally, collecting the evidence and securing a conviction, just like Gil - his dad - had taught him, instead of the way Dr. Whitly would’ve murdered the man. Malcolm had needed that. He’d needed that moment to prove to himself that he was not his father’s son, that he was his own person and he would choose to do right. He had defied what people had been saying about him for twenty years, and finally, he had taken himself back. Malcolm was not his father, and he was not what people thought of him.

“Just promise me you won’t do anything reckless,” his mother asked, exasperated.

“When have I ever done anything reckless?” Malcolm asked around a smile. His mother groaned.

“Goodbye, dear,” she said. “Please tell me if you really are going to come into a significant amount of money.”

“As if our family doesn’t already have more money than we could spend in five lifetimes?”

“ _Goodbye_ , dear,” she repeated, then hung up before Malcolm could reply.

Malcolm let his phone fall from his fingers onto the sheets. He kept staring at the ceiling with a smile on his face. Of course this didn’t seem to be earth-shattering news to his mom. He supposed that with everything else their family had been through, perhaps this wasn’t the biggest surprise. Finding out your husband or father was actually a notorious serial killer kind of made any other surprise dull by comparison, even if that surprise was a relative you didn’t know existed giving you millions of dollars.

With a sigh, Malcolm pulled himself back up and off the bed. Psychopathic fathers weren’t going to visit themselves in prison.

* * *

Malcolm wasn’t sure which was worse: going to Claremont to see his father, or Rikers. At Claremont, he had to deal with the distant screams, the memories of kids at school telling him that Claremont was where he belonged, and the idea that maybe those kids were right. But at Rikers, there was the shouting and banging on the cell doors, the vulgarities that the prisoners would scream at him and the hungry glares they sent his way, and the fear that he still might somehow end up there for Eddie’s murder. Both places were horrible enough to make Malcolm dread going there, and yet he did it all the time anyway. He had mostly gotten used to the horrors at Claremont, and he would most likely get used to how terrible Rikers was as well.

With armed guards on either side of him, Malcolm knew that he wasn’t actually in any danger as he was led throughout the prison to a private visitation room where he would be meeting his father, but that rational knowledge didn’t stop his fight or flight response from going off as prisoners stared down at him with hunger in their eyes. Malcolm looked straight ahead and did his best not to shudder. He was fine.

The drama queen he was, Dr. Whitly spun around with a flourish the moment the door behind Malcolm closed - just like at Claremont, all Malcolm had to do to leave was bang on the door.

“My boy,” he said, that psychotic smile glued on his face. The only difference, aside from the room itself, was the jumpsuit. It was orange instead of white, and it wasn’t covered by a cardigan. “How are things? How’s your sister?”

“I’m not here to talk about Ainsley or catch up,” Malcolm said. “Francis Whitly.” He watched as his father’s face remained exactly the same. The smile didn’t fall, he didn’t blink, he didn’t even take in a breath. He knew exactly who Malcolm was talking about. “So, having a small family was another lie, then?”

“Oh, Malcolm, you’ve always been such an inquisitive child-.”

“But I’m not a child anymore, Dr. Whitly. I haven’t been for quite some time now. I’m an adult and I’d like to be treated like one,” Malcolm interrupted. He didn’t feel like wasting time with his father’s manipulations and power plays.

“You’re right, you’re right,” Dr. Whitly stammered, holding up one cuffed hand in surrender. “You’ve grown into a very fine young man, and it’s time I start treating you like one. But Malcolm, you have to remember, you’ll always be my little boy.”

“ _Francis Whitly_ ,” Malcolm repeated, trying to get his father back on topic. “I need you to tell me everything about him, everything about your family, because clearly everything you’ve said before is a lie.”

“Well, not _everything_ ,” Dr. Whitly muttered. He plopped into the chair on his side of the table, and gestured for Malcolm to take the opposite side. Malcolm remained standing until it became clear that Dr. Whitly wouldn’t say anything else until he did. “My parents really are dead, I can promise you that.” He kept on going before Malcolm could say anything about what he may or may not have been implying. “So, Francis Whitly. How on earth did you hear about him? You’ve never expressed an interest in genealogy to me before.”

Malcolm straightened his suit jacket and set aside a few questions that he already had. He needed to focus on one thing at a time, and what was most important was Francis.

“It doesn’t matter. I’m asking the questions right now,” Malcolm said. “Now tell me about him, and why you lied about your family.”

Dr. Whitly sighed like a petulant child, but gave a nod in acquiescence. “Francis Whitly, my Uncle Francis, is my dad’s brother, but I haven’t spoken to him since I was a teenager. Really, son, the only reason I didn’t tell the family about him was because of my, uh, my hobbies. I just figured the fewer people involved, the better. Keeping in touch with him certainly would’ve had a lot of pros, but we’d never gotten along all that way, so the cons sort of outweighed them. It was really that simple.” Dr. Whitly shrugged and gave a smile, as if he were explaining something so simple as how to play checkers, but his smile fell short. It wasn’t one of his psychotic ones, but it was clearly fake nonetheless, not reaching his eyes, and coming and going at odd intervals.

“Come on, Dr. Whitly. You know I’m going to need more than that,” Malcolm said, looking at his father in disbelief.

“Why do you even need to know?” his father replied, slightly agitated. He fidgeted in his seat, another clear sign of discomfort.

“Why does talking about him bother you?”

“Because it’s ancient history, it doesn’t matter,” Dr. Whitly quickly claimed, far too quickly for that to be the real reason.

“I’m going to see him today,” Malcolm said, the lie slipping easily off his lips. It was only sort of a lie anyway. He was going to the man’s estate, and would be meeting him in spirit for the first time. It just wouldn’t be going the way that most first meetings went, since the man was dead.

“Don’t,” Dr. Whitly warned, his eyes going wide and body going rigid. “Malcolm, whatever you’re doing, you need to stop. This has nothing to do with me, I _promise_ you, but you need to stop.” It was the most sincere that Malcolm had ever heard his father. The man seemed genuinely disturbed by the idea of Malcolm seeing Francis, just as much as he’d wanted Malcolm to stop his investigation into Endicott.

“And why should I? After all, he’s _family_ ,” he said, not willing to give up the ruse just yet. Besides, with Endicott, Dr. Whitly had been much more concerned about himself than the wellbeing of his son. Why did he care so much this time?

“I think you and I both know that just because someone is family doesn’t mean that they’re safe to be around,” Dr. Whitly pointed out.

Malcolm scoffed. That was the first truly honest thing his father had said all day.

“You’re going to have to tell me why,” Malcolm said. “Just saying that he’s dangerous isn’t enough. I catch killers for a living. ‘Danger’ doesn’t quite have the same effect as it used to.”

“Oh, come on, son,” Dr. Whitly chided. “You and I both know that you don’t do _anything_ for a living. You were born into enough money to live like a prince for the rest of your life without ever having to even lift a finger. You catch killers because you can’t-.”

“ _The point_ , Dr. Whitly, is that if you want to be successful in your attempts to stop me from seeing Francis, then you need to stop deflecting and be honest with me,” Malcolm seethed. His father didn’t get to profile him, not when he was the cause of all of Malcolm’s trauma.

The man gave an overexaggerated sigh and shook his head, even throwing in an eye roll that Malcolm had a very hard time not returning. At least one of them had to be an adult.

“Let’s just say that there is more and more evidence that what I am, what your sister is,” he added with a knowing smirk. “Is genetic.”

“Ainsley isn’t anything like you,” Malcolm practically growled, despite knowing that his sister really was much more like their father than he would like to admit. “Killing Endicott does not make her anything like you.”

“Really? My boy, you and I both know that your sister is much more ruthless and cunning than you ever thought,” Dr. Whitly replied.

“And what does Ainsley have to do with Francis? Are you saying that Francis has killed someone?” he asked, trying once more to direct the conversation back to the topic at hand. He’d fallen for the bait to slip into defending his sister, but he couldn’t let that happen again. He couldn’t let Dr. Whitly manipulate the conversation like that. If his father didn’t give him answers soon, Malcolm was going to leave, and take his chances at the estate.

“I can’t say for sure on that, but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised,” Dr. Whitly said with a slight shrug. “He always did have a certain mysterious aura about him, like he always knew more than you did, but he was never going to say what he knew. And that house certainly has its secrets.”

“Secrets like a hidden basement left over from prohibition, or secrets like a dozen bodies buried on the grounds?”

“If I told you, then they wouldn’t be secrets, now would they?” he said with that unsettling grin of his.

Malcolm abruptly pushed his chair away from the table, making to stand up. If his father wasn’t going to give him anything useful, then there was no point in him being there.

“Wait, Malcolm,” Dr. Whitly called out. Malcolm looked pointedly back at him, giving him one final opportunity to tell him the truth. His father took a deep breath and flexed his fingers, as if trying to bleed nerves away. “Please, son, don’t go to that house. There is a reason that I never went back. That house, there’s something wrong with it. Call it haunted, cursed, it doesn’t matter. That house certainly has its ghosts. Bad things happen there. People get hurt. I don’t want something to happen to you.”

Malcolm scoffed. “Maybe the only bad thing there was you,” he couldn’t help but say.

“Look up the history of the house,” Dr. Whitly continued, ignoring Malcolm’s insult. “See for yourself, just don’t go there. Whatever Francis wants with you, don’t give it to him. You think I’m ‘manipulative’?” he asked, using air quotes. “You don’t know the meaning of the word. You want to know the real reason why I never told any of you about my family? It’s because I was protecting you from them. It’s because we’re the same, because we’re all the same, and don’t you dare forget that you’re the same as us too.” Dr. Whitly stopped, a scowl on his face and anger in his eyes. Malcolm fought to keep his own expression passive. His father didn’t need to know that he was having the same effect on him that he always had, that once again, Malcolm was scared and every instinct he had was telling him to bow his head in submission and accept his father’s words. Malcolm fought against that instinct with every fiber of his being, and stared at his father head-on.

“We’re not the same,” he said, his voice shaking just ever so slightly, and not quite as strong as Malcolm had wanted it to be. “I think we’re done here, Dr. Whitly,” he said, quickly standing up and moving back to the door.

“Wait, Malcolm, wait,” his father called out again, but Malcolm ignored him, instead banging his fist against the door to alert the guard that he was ready to leave. “You can’t go there,” Dr. Whitly continued, his voice sounding almost panicked. The door opened, and Malcolm immediately stepped out, his hand shaking by his side. “Malcolm, don’t!” his father shouted after him, the sound muffled through the wall. But Malcolm kept walking, letting out a shaky breath as he did so. He was fine. All in all, that had been a fairly standard visit with his father. Although that really did say something about the nature of their relationship, it was the truth. Malcolm often left his father, feeling rattled and just a little bit scared. This time was just the same.

But now, he was on his way to meet Gil. The thought of his mentor brought a smile to his face, as it so often did. Gil always did make him feel better. Even the fresh air outside Rikers made him feel better. The air was thick with humidity, and the smell of rain was carried with every blow of the wind. It was wonderful.

By the time he arrived at his favorite coffee shop, the rain had just started. Tiny droplets fell from the sky and streaked down the windows of his cab, each drop chasing another to the bottom.

Malcolm took a few hurried steps inside, not keen on getting wet if he didn’t have to, at least not while wearing a thousand-dollar suit. Gil was already inside, sitting at a table in the corner where he could see the entire establishment. He had a view into the kitchen as well as a perfect sightline for the front door. Nothing was going to happen in that coffee shop without Gil knowing about it. He’d been that way for as long as Malcolm had known him, and it had proven a worthy habit more than once.

Gil waved him over with a smile, and gestured to the seat across from him. There were two coffee cups on the table, Gil having bought Malcolm’s for him - he did that frequently, no matter how many times Malcolm insisted that he should be the one paying for Gil’s.

“Hey, kid,” Gil greeted as Malcolm sat down. “What sort of weird thing happened this morning that you didn’t want to explain over the phone?”

Malcolm took a sip of his sweet latte before answering. “I got a call,” he started carefully. “From a man claiming to be the executor of the trust of my great uncle Francis. He said that Francis passed away and he left absolutely everything to me. And the weirdest part of all of this, is that I’ve never met my great uncle Francis. I didn’t even know he existed until this morning.” He paused for a moment, taking in Gil’s very concerned face. “I went to Rikers and talked with my father, and he admitted that Francis was real, but he kept dancing around the subject, not wanting to answer any questions, and trying to keep me from visiting the estate he left me.”

Gil just stared at him for a moment, opening and closing his mouth, as though he wanted to say something, but the words just weren’t coming. Malcolm couldn’t blame him. How were you supposed to respond to that?

“Let me get this straight,” Gil said, holding up a hand. “You got a call about an inheritance from a surprise relative that your father had hidden from you?” Malcolm nodded. “Well, what did your mother say?”

Malcolm smiled. “She wasn’t as shocked as I was,” he said. “At this point, she’s been surprised so many times by our family that nothing can shock her anymore.” He pulled out his phone and pulled up a satellite image of the mansion. “The executor said it’s 15,000 square feet.” Malcolm handed his phone over to Gil, whose jaw dropped almost immediately.

“Why would he leave it to you if he never met you?” he asked. Malcolm shrugged.

“That’s all part of the mystery,” he said. “The executor asked me to come by the estate today so I could, and I quote, see all that I have acquired, and see what I must undertake in order to acquire the rest.” He looked at Gil in disbelief. Who even talked like that?

“I don’t like how that sounds, kid,” Gil said. “Are you planning on going today?”

“I need to get to the bottom of whatever is going on. I can only do that if I go to the estate,” Malcolm said, a bit more apologetic than he intended to. He didn’t want Gil to be mad at him for taking something he saw as an unnecessary risk.

“Okay,” Gil said with a nod. “I’ll let Dani and JT know I won’t be coming back in today.” He pulled out his phone and began to type.

“What? Why?” Malcolm hoped that Gil was doing what Malcolm thought he was doing.

“What do you mean, ‘what’?” Gil asked him with a smile. “I’m coming with you, kid. You think there’s any chance I’m letting you figure this out on your own? Not on your life.” He shook his head fondly as he slipped his phone back into his pocket.

Malcolm couldn’t help but smile and duck his head. That was exactly what he’d wanted Gil to do, but he had been too embarrassed to ask. But of course, Gil knew him better than anyone, and loved him more than Malcolm thought anyone ever would. He shouldn’t have been surprised.

“Thanks,” he said, still not making eye contact. Malcolm took a sip of his coffee and finally looked up at Gil again, who was still just smiling at him fondly.

“Of course, kid,” he replied. “How far away is it?”

“About an hour north of the city is what the executor said.”

“Then let’s get going,” Gil said, pushing himself away from the table and standing up. He grabbed his coffee and stood by while Malcolm did the same.

“Are you sure you want to come with me?” Malcolm confirmed. “I can do it on my own if you have work you need to do.”

“I can put off paperwork for another day,” Gil easily replied as he pushed the door open, holding it open for Malcolm. He smiled again, but faltered when he noticed that the slight sprinkle of rain had turned into a full-on downpour.

“I don’t suppose you have an umbrella?” he asked Gil with a smile. The man shook his head with a cringe, then stepped out into the downpour, quickly making his way around to the front seat of the car, parallel parked right in front of the building. With a sigh, Malcolm left the comfort of the overhang and got to the passenger door as quickly as he could, hunching his shoulders in reaction to the cold water suddenly pouring down his neck. He couldn’t get to the dry safety of the LeMans fast enough. Malcolm shook like a wet dog the moment he closed the door. Gil laughed at him.

“Want me to turn the heat up?” he asked Malcolm with a grin, but he began to turn the knob before Malcolm could even answer. “Should I keep a blanket in here for you?”

“The rain is cold, that’s not just me,” Malcolm insisted, despite knowing that Gil could point to many times that Malcolm had been colder than everyone else, even without rain.

“Whatever you say,” Gil said with a shrug as he began to pull out of the parking spot and onto the road.

The city traffic was the same as it always was, meaning terrible, but Malcolm didn’t mind it too much. He and Gil spent the long drive out of the city and into the countryside in a mixture of comfortable silence and meaningless conversation. There was nothing they could talk about that could possibly be more interesting than the situation they were driving to.

About half an hour into the drive, nerves started getting the best of Malcolm. What if all of this was some horrible trap? His father’s words were echoing around in his mind, making him doubt himself and what he was walking into. He wasn’t one to believe in ghosts. If any family would be haunted, it certainly would be his, and Malcolm had never experienced anything paranormal. There could certainly be an argument made that Malcolm himself was cursed, but then again, everything he went through was just a natural consequence of his father’s actions. A natural consequence certainly negated the need to attribute anything to a curse. Still, his father had seemed genuinely disturbed by the idea of Malcolm going to the estate. Martin Whitly didn’t do genuine emotion that wasn’t actually genuine. But why would he have a need to be disturbed at the idea of Malcolm going there?

“What’s goin’ on, kid? That look is never good,” Gil asked him, taking a longer glance at him than the driver of the vehicle should.

“It’s nothing, I’m just…” he trailed off, knowing that if he admitted he was dwelling on what Dr. Whitly had told him, then he would get the standard reply from Gil that talking to his father was always a bad idea - and really, Gil was right, but Malcolm wasn’t about to admit that either. Though he didn’t want to lie to Gil either. “There’s just a lot that doesn’t add up,” he finally said.

Gil let out a low laugh. “Yeah, this is one of the weirder things that’s happened to you, and that is certainly saying something.” He shook his head, and Malcolm let out a scoff in agreement. “But whatever’s going on, I’m gonna help you figure it out. That’s why I’m here with you, kid. We’ll figure it out together, and if you really are about to inherit several million more dollars, then maybe I’ll let you buy the coffee next time.”

Malcolm smiled and lightly shoved Gil’s shoulder, knowing that no matter how much money he had, Gil would never let Malcolm pay for anything unless it was done in secret, so Gil couldn’t stop him. That was the only way that Malcolm was able to pay to fix the LeMans. Gil had completely refused to let Malcolm pay for the repairs, but once the money was transferred and the repairs were done, all without Gil knowing about it, then there wasn’t exactly anything Gil could do to stop it.

The rain continued to pour down as they drove further out of the city and into the countryside. The road before them looked slightly less foreboding than the road behind them, but with the direction the clouds were going, it soon wouldn’t matter. They were driving away from the storm, but the storm was following them. Dark clouds stretched across the horizon, shrouding the state in a gloomy haze. The windshield wipers could barely keep up with the downpour, almost making Malcolm nervous that they should pull over and wait for the rain to let up even a little bit, but Gil seemed unbothered. Then again, even if he were bothered, he wouldn’t let Malcolm know. His whole being was wrapped up in being a pillar of strength for Malcolm to cling to, meaning that no matter what, he was calm.

Generally, Gil was able to keep to that, at least in front of him. Malcolm knew that there had been times when Gil had, in fact, lost his cool in the faces of those who had hurt him, but that was only once Malcolm was once again safe and sound. Malcolm would’ve been lying if he said he didn’t appreciate the strength that Gil had always been able to provide. Hopefully, with whatever was going on at the estate, it would be no different. Gil was right. He was going to help him figure it out.

Malcolm turned his attention to the storm once more. He saw the first strike of lighting in the side view mirror. Behind them, the storm was getting worse, but they seemed to be outrunning it, at least for the time being. The rain had lessened to the point where Gil brought the wipers down a level, but they couldn’t completely escape it. They were outrunning it, but it would only last for so long. The storm still followed.


	2. Chapter 2

The remainder of the drive was spent in comfortable silence. Malcolm tried not to dwell on his father’s words, deciding to attempt to be optimistic about it instead. He pushed away that pillar of dread, and instead tried to think about how cool it was that he was inheriting millions of dollars and getting a 15,000 foot estate. Not many people could say they had done that. With all of that money, he could ensure that his team lived comfortably for the rest of their lives, and donate even more to wildlife sanctuaries and human rights organizations and orphanages and animal shelters and so much more. He could do a lot of good with every single dollar that he was supposedly about to inherit.

The smile that grew on Malcolm’s face turned into a look of shock as Gil rounded a corner and the estate came into view. Just as Caswell had said, they crossed over a bridge over a moat before arriving at the gate.

“That’s a little extreme,” Gil muttered, and Malcolm couldn’t help but agree. He rattled off the gate code that Caswell had given to him, but shuddered as the gate locked with a metallic clang behind them.

They were out of the storm for the time being, that didn’t keep the estate from being any less intimidating. It seemed even more massive up close. The gothic architecture was evident from the first glance. The high arches were each topped with some sort of gargoyle, and multiple chimneys were scattered haphazardly along the roof. Windows were everywhere, each one more elaborate than the next, some with arched tops. In its time, the house was probably beautiful, and really, it still was, but it needed some help. Many of the bricks were chipping away, and much of the masonry needed to be repaired. Once again, his father’s words about the estate being haunted came back into the forefront of Malcolm’s mind. If any house looked to be haunted, it was certainly this one. The estate was beautiful, but something about it just made a pool of dread settle in Malcolm’s stomach.

“Too much house?” he asked Gil, trying to make the dread settle back down. It was only a house, after all.

Gil chuckled, shaking his head. “You know it, kid,” he said with a smile. He pulled into a parking space directly in front of the house, under one of the many arches. “Can’t any of your relatives be normal, with a house in the suburbs?” Gil asked him.

“Evidently not,” Malcolm replied around a smile. The two of them got out of the car, and walked towards what looked like the front door - the estate was so massive that they couldn’t be sure. Malcolm took in as much of the estate as he could, craning his neck to look up at the expanse of windows and steeples. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw the curtain behind one of them move, but Malcolm was used to his mind playing tricks on him.

Gil took the lead and took a solid grip on the ornate door knocker, giving it three firm hits against the equally ornate door. He then stepped back, but still kept his place in front of Malcolm, just as he always did when they were on a case and going to a suspect’s house. This wasn’t the same thing, but that didn’t seem to make a difference to Gil.

The door finally opened, revealing a pale man of around Gil’s age. He was dressed even more finely than Malcolm, like he walked straight off a movie set where he was playing a butler, instead of being an actual one himself.

“Mr. Whitly-, no, I apologize, Mr. Bright, welcome to the Whitly Estate. I am Hugh Caswell. We spoke on the telephone,” the man said. He looked pointedly at Gil. “You are not a Whitly,” he continued, his voice thick with thinly veiled derision.

“No, I’m not,” Gil replied, ever the professional. “I’m Lieutenant Gil Arroyo of the NYPD.”

“He’s with me,” Malcolm added with a smile before Caswell could reply. The man sighed, then opened the door widely, waving them both inside. As always, Gil walked through first, keeping his place in front of Malcolm, always wanting to be just that much closer to whatever danger that could appear in front of them. Once, Malcolm had tried to tell Gil that that was unnecessary, but the man had shut down that line of thinking rather quickly, claiming it his duty as Malcolm’s pseudo-parent - Malcolm had been a teenager at the time, and constantly flipped between two extremes, being fiercely independent or craving care. Gil’s response had satiated both of those extremes. It took the pressure off Malcolm to seek out that comfort, while affirming that there was nothing Malcolm could do to make Gil stop.

Hands in his pockets, Malcolm gazed around the ornate hall he and Gil had walked into. From the high ceilings hung exquisite chandeliers, yet cobwebs hung from them. There were portraits hanging all over the walls, and they were beautiful, but many of them had clearly seen better days. Malcolm’s mother knew of several reputable art restoration professionals who could certainly help them out. The most prominent portrait looked a bit more recent. Malcolm tilted his head as he stared at it.

“That, sir, would be your great uncle Francis,” Caswell said, coming to stand right off to Malcolm’s left flank, his breath uncomfortably tickling Malcolm’s neck, almost making him shudder. He reflexively took a step forward, still gazing up at the slightly decayed portrait. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Gil walking between them, putting himself between Malcolm and Caswell, but Malcolm was still focused on the painting. The portrait couldn’t have been that old, so why was it in such poor condition? For having two people living there, the entire estate seemed to be much more neglected than it should have been.

“How did Francis die?” he asked the butler, spinning around to face the man. Gil was giving the estate the same quizzical stare that Malcolm was using.

“Sudden complete organ failure,” Caswell replied. It sounded real enough, but Malcolm knew enough about medicine to know that it couldn’t be. Entire organ systems didn’t just completely shut down at the same time, at least not for no reason - generally not for any reason at all, at least not one that Malcolm could think of. But the butler was confident in his reply. He spoke it as if he were speaking the truth.

“So he had no idea that he was dying?” Malcolm asked.

Caswell hesitated before responding, “Everyone knows they’re dying.” He stepped away, and beckoned Malcolm and Gil to follow him.

“This is more than a little weird,” Gil muttered to him. Malcolm scoffed under his breath in reply. Caswell turned around so quickly that Malcolm and Gil nearly ran into him.

“It would be wise for you to think about each word before you speak it,” he said. He looked between the two of them, then around their surroundings conspiratorially. “You know not how your words will be perceived,” he finished in a whisper before swiftly turning back around and continuing to walk down the long hall. Once again, Gil and Malcolm shared a confused glance, but continued following him.

They passed from the front entryway into an old sitting area. Dust covered everything. It was surprising that an estate that large didn’t seem to have a maid or housekeeper. There hadn’t been any other cars that Malcolm had seen, and he hadn’t yet seen any other people inside the house, but maybe he was wrong.

“If I’m inheriting this estate, am I inheriting the staff that work here already?” he asked, attempting to draw out how many people actually worked there.

“Yes, sir,” Caswell responded. “But that is only myself and the groundskeeper. You are, of course, free to hire anyone of your choosing, but I must warn you that people don’t tend to stay in the employ of the Whitly Estate for very long.” If it was only the butler and the groundskeeper, then Malcolm definitely hadn’t actually seen anyone upstairs. He had to remind himself that every now and then, regular people thought they saw movement when nothing had actually happened too. That wasn’t always an indicator of his unstable mind.

Caswell kept walking, leading them out of the sitting room and into the dining room. The table was longer than the one in the Milton home, and more ornate as well, with clawed feet and intricate woodwork on the edges. Just as in the entryway, the chandeliers were coated in cobwebs.

“Why don’t people stay?” Gil asked, a suspicious edge in his voice. Ever diligent, he was still a step ahead of Malcolm, but ever since Caswell had stood behind Malcolm as he viewed the portrait, Gil had been keeping himself in between Malcolm and Caswell specifically. It was a change that Malcolm had certainly noticed, and he would’ve been lying if he said he didn’t appreciate it on some level. Caswell did make him uncomfortable, but there was nothing wrong with him that Malcolm could point to. The man was just slightly off-putting.

“A variety of reasons, many of which I will not delve into at the present time, but generally they left to seek other employment, finding the conditions at the Whitly Estate not to be to their liking,” Caswell responded, still walking straight in front of them. They passed from the dining room and into a small study, where Caswell finally stopped. The man went around the desk and took a hold of two papers. “These are the forms that you will need to be signing. The trust has been notarized, and I am already in the process of transferring all of the assets belonging to Francis to you, sir. There are however, more forms that need your signature, and there are tasks you must undertake in order to secure the rest of your inheritance.”

Malcolm had so many questions. He didn’t even know where to begin, but he had to start somewhere.

“Why me?” he asked. “I never even met the man. He had to have had a closer relative, or even a friend that he would have rather given everything to,” he insisted.

Caswell looked at him pointedly. “Well, it certainly would have served no point to give anything to your father, and with your sister’s current situation, it seemed illogical to Francis to put anything else on Miss Ainsley’s plate. Besides,” he said, his voice dropping slightly lower as an unsettling grin spread across his face. “You were simply the best candidate to undertake a task such as this, better than even your sister despite her prowess, better than Francis could ever have hoped for.” What did that even mean? Malcolm looked over at Gil to see that he looked just as confused as Malcolm. Caswell pointed to several boxes stacked throughout the study. “Francis never took to modern technology, so all of his documents are in these files. I suggest you start going through them. Somewhere, within this study, Francis has placed the instructions. You need them in order to receive your true inheritance and embrace your true heritage.” He clapped once, the sound echoing throughout the room. “I suggest you get started. I will be around, if you require me. After all, this is your estate, Mr. Bright. I only work here.” He began to walk away, out of the study.

“Wait, what do you mean ‘embrace my true heritage’?” Malcolm asked, calling out after Caswell as the man continued to walk. The butler didn’t turn around, or even acknowledge that Malcolm had asked him a question. Malcolm took a step to follow, but was stopped by Gil’s hand on his shoulder.

“Hold on a second, kid,” he said. “You don’t need me to tell you that something here doesn’t feel right.” Malcolm nodded, brows furrowed. Something was wrong, but there was nothing he could point to other than things just being weird. “Let me call JT and Dani in. If nothing else, they can help us go through all of these papers.” He gestured towards the stacks of boxes.

It was a study, but there wasn’t a computer in sight. There wasn’t a telephone either. Now that Malcolm thought about it, he hadn’t seen a TV yet, or a security system, or any form of modern technology at all. The most high tech things he saw were the lights, but even those were significantly dated, with long filaments stretching across the length of the oblong bulbs. Francis Whitly had certainly resisted the digital age with fervor.

“This is a lot of boxes,” Malcolm muttered, gazing around the study. He didn’t know what they were looking for, but he supposed they would know when they found it.

“That’s why I’m calling for backup,” Gil said with a smile. “You should try it some time.” Malcolm turned to him with a halfhearted glare, but Gil only smiled more. “I told Dani and JT to take the rest of the day off and come here. They’re confused, but they’re listening to me. They’ll be here in a little over an hour. Paperwork can wait until tomorrow, and whatever is going on here might be more important. Four detectives are better than two.” Malcolm smiled at Gil’s inclusion of him in the number of detectives, then grabbed a box of a stack of four of them. He set it on the floor and plopped right in front of it. Gil did the same.

The next hour was spent in a boredom that nearly had Malcolm falling asleep. In a way, he was still profiling, but profiling while going through seemingly endless piles of bills wasn’t nearly as interesting as doing it while researching someone’s childhood or their victimology. But, just as Gil always said, police work was patience. He would find something interesting on Francis in time, he just had to be patient in order to get there.

“Have you found anything at all?” he asked Gil in exasperation. Maybe he was having more luck.

“If I’d found something that I thought you could use for a profile, I’d tell you,” Gil pointed out with a shake of his head.

Neither of them had said they were even working on a profile, but in essence, that was what they were doing. Malcolm was trying to work up a profile of a dead man, of Francis Whitly, in the hope that it would illuminate the current situation, which was so far removed from anything that Malcolm had ever dealt with before. And on top of that, there was Caswell. The man was clearly hiding something, something big, but Malcolm didn’t have the slightest inkling as to what it was. He still spoke like he was in a movie, and Malcolm had no idea where to go with that.

“What exactly did your dad say about him?” Gil asked, letting the papers fall from his hands. They looked like bills too. It didn’t look like Francis had ever thrown anything away in his life. Excessive record keeping would normally tell Malcolm that Francis was meticulously detail oriented and organized, but the boxes had been scattered haphazardly throughout the room, which said the opposite. They were dusty, so clearly Caswell hadn’t moved them, meaning that Francis had put the bills and records neatly in those boxes, then just left the boxes wherever, with no order to them or storage place, despite the house being massive enough to have more than enough storage.

The house was another matter entirely when it came to the profile. There was just so much going on with the house itself that Malcolm was honestly a little overwhelmed with it all. He didn’t want to take the time to think on the state of the house, and what that meant. Thinking of all the possibilities just made him so anxious, more so than any case not connected to his father had any right to be - although, technically, the house was related to his father too. Was it just his family? He couldn’t handle even thinking about it, almost going into a full anxiety attack whenever he tried. He couldn’t do it, and if he were being honest with himself, he didn’t know why. Even investigating the girl in the box hadn’t been so anxiety inducing during the actual investigation itself. What was wrong?

“Kid, you okay?” Gil asked him, ducking his head to catch Malcolm’s gaze. It was then that Malcolm remembered the question that he hadn’t even answered. He blinked and shook his head as if to clear his mind.

“Yeah, I just-. Yeah, I’m fine,” he insisted, but Gil didn’t look very convinced. Malcolm continued before Gil could question him on it. “My father didn’t tell me anything useful. He didn’t want me coming here, saying that it was dangerous here and he didn’t want anything to happen to me.” He rolled his eyes, knowing that Dr. Whitly’s concern for him wasn’t actually for him, but for the value he had to his father as a possession, as something to control. “He implied that the reason he never told us about his family was because they’re just as dangerous as him.” He shook his head. Dr. Whitly being a pathological liar always made it difficult to glean the truth. “He thinks that Francis may have killed people, and, to his credit, he did seem genuinely disturbed by the idea of me coming to this house. He said he hasn’t been here or seen Francis since he was a teenager. His reasons, I don’t know, but his fear about this place was very real.”

Gil shook his head. “You never know with him,” he muttered. “You should take a look at the papers Caswell said you needed to sign.” Malcolm nodded. That was as good an excuse as any to get up and stretch his legs. With an exaggerated groan, Malcolm unfolded himself and stood up. “You gettin’ old, kid?” Gil joked.

“Not as old as you,” Malcolm fired back, his smile just as wide as Gil’s as he moved around to the desk. On it there were several papers, all with places to sign at the bottom. They were pre-signed by Caswell at the witness line, with the date left blank for Malcolm to fill in.

“Dani and JT are almost here,” Gil said. “I just gave them the gate code.” Malcolm nodded in lieu of a response, his attention mostly on the papers laid out on the desk. For legal documents, they weren’t very long. They were typed, but each one was only a single page, with a few short paragraphs on each. Francis had to have known he was dying far enough in advance to get these written up, but not far enough in advance to make them any more formal or detailed. So what happened to him? Caswell had said sudden total organ failure, but that just wasn’t a thing. Maybe he could have Edrisa take a look at the body, if he were lucky and it hadn’t been cremated yet.

A few solid knocks echoed throughout the house, making him jump. Malcolm let the papers fall back to the desk and out of his hands, faintly hearing the sound of the door opening. The conversation was too quiet for him to hear it from three rooms away, but the telltale sound of Dani’s heeled boots on the wood floors told him that at least Caswell had let them inside. A moment later, the man led them into the study.

“I wasn’t aware you would be bringing guests so soon,” Caswell said, the disgust thinly veiled in his voice.

“Well, you did say it was my house,” Malcolm quickly responded with a smile. Dani and JT looked very confused, but walked further into the study to stand with Malcolm and Gil.

“That it is, sir,” Caswell muttered, then started to walk away.

“Wait, Caswell,” Malcolm said, taking a few steps closer to him. Caswell stopped, then turned around with a sigh. “Where is Francis’ body? I’d like to have it examined by our ME.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but Francis had already been buried.”

“Where?”

“The family plot at the back of the house.”

Malcolm froze. There was a family cemetery on the grounds? He knew that was common a hundred years ago, but that wasn’t something that you saw in the twenty-first century.

Caswell turned and walked away, clearly taking Malcolm’s stunned silence as an end to the conversation. This time, Malcolm didn’t call after him.

“What the hell is going on?” Dani asked. “What are we doing here, and why didn’t you tell us you had a several million dollar mansion?”

“And a butler that’s creepy as hell,” JT muttered, walking around the study, looking at all the boxes and bookshelves.

Malcolm sighed, gearing up to explain it all for at least the third time. “This morning, I got a phone call from that butler, saying that my great uncle had died, I had inherited everything, and I needed to come to this estate at my earliest convenience to go over everything and, I quote, ‘see all that I have acquired and what I must undertake in order to acquire the rest’. The problem is, I didn’t even know I had a Great Uncle Francis, or that this mansion even existed, until this morning. I spoke to my father about it, but in trademark fashion, he danced around the subject and wouldn’t give me any straight answers as to why he lied to us about his family. And now here we are, swimming in bills and no closer to finding out the truth.”

“And I’m sure you’ve noticed the vibe here?” JT asked him, glancing down at the papers on the desk.

“Something certainly isn’t right,” Malcolm admitted with a sardonic smile. He plopped down into the large desk chair - and it wasn’t just large, it made Malcolm feel like a small child with its size.

“And that’s where you two come in,” Gil added. “You’re gonna help us figure it out. I don’t know anyone better than you at sifting through piles of paperwork in search of evidence,” he said, giving them a smile. Dani and JT both groaned, turning to look at the stacks of boxes, each containing file upon file.

“And what are we looking for, exactly?” JT asked as he grabbed a box off the stack and set it down in front of him. The desk chair was the only chair in the room, so JT got down onto the floor with another groan to go through it, mirroring Gil’s position.

“Let me guess,” Dani said with a sarcastic grin. “We’ll know it when we see it?”

“Bingo,” Gil replied, not even looking up at them.

Malcolm smiled, then turned his attention back to the papers sitting on the desk in front of him. None of them were too suspect. There didn’t seem to be any hidden messages, and there wasn’t any fine print to be worried about. Still, Malcolm was nervous to sign them. Without knowing exactly what was going on, it just didn’t feel right.

“What do you make of these?” he asked, looking over at Gil. If Gil read through them, and thought it was okay, then Malcolm would sign them, but not before.

Clearly suppressing a groan, Gil stood up and walked over to the desk. He stretched before leaning over it, his body protesting the lack of back support while sitting on the floor. Malcolm stood up and motioned for Gil to take the chair. Gil was the one who had a bad back from chasing after criminals since he was eighteen, not Malcolm. With a grateful smile, Gil plopped down into the chair and took the first paper in his hands. Malcolm leaned against the chair, almost sitting on the armrest, and reread the document in Gil’s hands for the third time. It was simple, just a statement that Francis Whitly was bequeathing everything located on estate property to Malcolm, then a list of the most valuable items in the estate with the approximate value of the estate as a whole listed at the bottom. It was a staggering amount of money, significantly more than one person could ever use, and more than one person could even acquire by themselves. It wasn’t just the money that Francis had, it was the entire Whitly family fortune. If New York thought the Miltons were rich, they clearly hadn’t been paying attention. So why didn’t anyone know about the Whitly family beyond The Surgeon? Martin Whitly wasn’t known to have come from money, but clearly he did. Everything about the estate that Malcolm uncovered only gave him more questions.

“That’s, uh, that’s a lot of money,” Gil muttered, stroking his beard. Malcolm scoffed, but agreed. That was the understatement of the century.

JT looked up at them, curiosity outweighing whatever boring bill he was looking at. “How much money are we talking?” he asked.

Malcolm sighed, then looked between JT and Dani. “Over three billion dollars,” he said, then looked at the ground. He felt ashamed, although he couldn’t quite put his finger on why. Dani’s sharp intake of air was the only reaction he heard. “That’s more than the entire Milton fortune, more money than I’ve even ever known.” Malcolm looked back up at them, and couldn’t help but give the smallest smile at JT’s look of shock.

“If you get all that, beer is on you for at least a month,” JT finally said.

Malcolm laughed. If he got all that money, he would be doing much more than buying beer for his friends. He would pay off literally every single debt they had, set aside more money than their children could ever need for college, and give each of them a luxury vacation every year for the rest of their lives, and that would just be the start. As it was, he already wanted to do that, but most of his money was actually his mother’s, and she wouldn’t approve of that on top of his friends rejecting anything they saw as a hand out.

“How does someone even make that much money?” Dani asked with a roll of her eyes. She went back to the papers in front of her. “I thought rich people all had business managers or whatever to take care of their bills for them. If your uncle was that rich, why did he keep all these?”

“Caswell said the only permanent employees here were himself and the groundskeeper,” Malcolm replied. “Apparently other employees never stayed long, although he wouldn’t go into why.” He looked back down at Gil, who was still holding the document. “What do you think?” he asked, motioning towards it.

“Kid, I’m not gonna tell you to sign anything, especially without a lawyer having gone over it first, but from what I can tell, this is pretty straightforward. You’re only signing to agree to the transfer of assets, that everything that belonged to Francis now belongs to you, which Caswell said he already started anyway, and it’s signed by Francis too,” Gil said. He gave a light sigh and a small shrug. “But I’m not a lawyer. I’m sure your family has one you can call. This other one is just a basic employee contract, guaranteeing employees the same pay and benefits that they had under your uncle, and it’s already been approved by both the butler and the groundskeeper. But if you want to look around a little more before signing it, that seems fair to me.” Gil stood from the chair and put his hand on Malcolm’s shoulder, giving it a light squeeze before going back to the piles of bills and other documents. Malcolm sighed, then slipped back into the chair from the armrest. He supposed it was a good idea to make the call to the family lawyer before he signed anything.

Malcolm leaned back in the massive chair and pulled out his phone. Somewhere in there, he had the contact information for several different attorneys. Ainsley’s situation had made sure of that. He tapped on the attorney best suited for the situation, and was about to pull his phone up to his ear when the “no signal” message flashed across the screen. That was odd. Gil had been able to text Dani and JT, so maybe it was just his phone.

“Do you guys have signal?” he asked, looking between the three of them.

“Yeah,” Gil answered hesitantly. He pulled out his phone, then turned his head in confusion. “Okay, maybe not.”

“Same here,” Dani said. “No bars.”

“Nothin’,” JT added.

Malcolm sighed, looking back down at his own phone and the lack of bars. Maybe the house itself was just sketchy? In a house that old, there had to be a landline somewhere. He would go look for it, and just call from there.

“I’ll be back,” he said, standing up from the desk and grabbing the two papers. He would just read them off to the lawyer instead of making them drive up.

“Where are you going?” Gil asked him, sounding more than a little concerned. Malcolm smiled.

“I’m just going to find a landline. There has to be one around here. And if somehow there’s not, I’ll talk to Caswell about the signal,” he answered with a shrug.

“Do you want me to come with you?” he asked.

“Gil,” JT interjected. “There’s only one other guy in the house. How much trouble do you think Bright is gonna get into?”

“I appreciate your concern,” Malcolm answered around a smile. “But JT is right. I’ll be fine.”

Gil muttered something about Malcolm being able to find trouble in an empty room, but waved him off and looked back at the stacks of paper nonetheless. Malcolm turned and began to walk back into the dining room.

“Gil will send out a search party if you’re not back in ten minutes,” Dani called out after him. He chuckled under his breath and shook his head, but kept walking.

The house was only slightly more unsettling now that he was walking through it alone. But nothing was out of place, nothing had changed, and there was no reason for him to feel unsettled at all - at least, no physical reason.

He walked from the dining room, through the sitting room, and back into the front entryway. There was no sign of Caswell, and no landline anywhere that he could see. For a moment, Malcolm stood as still and silent as he could, and focused on listening. He didn’t want to shout throughout the house for the man, but there had to be a way to hear him. Malcolm took a deep breath and closed his eyes, giving all of his attention to what he could hear. Back the way he came, he could hear faint conversation from his team, the voices muddled and indistinguishable. Malcolm tried to block that out and focus on the other directions. He could hear the wind as it began to beat against the old walls of the house - the slow moving storm had almost caught up to them, the wind harkening its arrival. Malcolm tried not to think of it as a bad omen.

A feather light touch across his shoulders and neck had Malcolm gasping in surprise and opening his eyes in shock, even falling forward a step, as if he’d been pushed despite the faintness of the touch. He spun around, but there was no one behind him, and he couldn’t hear anything beyond the sound of his own heartbeat.

“Hello?” he called out. Maybe someone had run by and he’d just somehow missed them. Or, maybe - much more likely - he was beginning to hallucinate again, the constant stress he was under because of Ainsley and now everything with Francis was making him lose his grip on reality once more.

Malcolm stepped back and took a deep breath. He needed to calm down. Thinking he felt something when he didn’t one single time didn’t mean he was going crazy again - he ignored his father’s voice in his head that told him he’d never stopped being crazy. But either way, he couldn’t worry about it. He still needed to find Caswell and a landline.

He looked back up at the decaying portrait of his great uncle, then shook his head and was about to continue walking in the opposite direction when a flash of movement on the stairs caught his eye. But when Malcolm turned to look, there was nothing there. Still, a part of him - the part of him that didn’t know how to tell the difference between his hallucinations and real life - needed to follow it.

His heart hammering in his ribcage, Malcolm took a few slow steps towards the winding staircase. The sound of a light rain beginning to pitter-patter against the windows announced the arrival of the storm. Soon, the drizzle would turn into a torrential downpour, complete with copious amounts of thunder and lightning, and the storm would wreak havoc on the estate. Looking around, the estate didn’t look like it could take much more - but somehow, Malcolm knew that it could.

Reaching the bottom step, Malcolm looked up the stairs. He didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. With a bit more confidence, he took a step up.

“Excuse me, sir?”

Malcolm jerked his head over to see Caswell standing by the portrait of Francis. He let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding, and forced a smile.

“I was looking for you,” Malcolm replied. He stepped off the stairs and towards the man, papers still in hand. “Is there a landline anywhere? None of us are getting any signal anymore, but we were all fine not long ago,” he said. Maybe it was just the storm that was causing it, but either way, it was odd and unsettling.

“There is a single landline, yes. It is located at the desk in the library, just through there,” Caswell replied, gesturing towards the only room on the other side of the front entryway. That was where Malcolm had been going to look before he felt that urge to go upstairs.

“Thank you,” he said, then began to make his way over. Part of him felt uncomfortable turning his back to Caswell, to someone he didn’t trust, but Malcolm knew that was just his overly suspicious nature getting the better of him.

The library was one of the largest rooms in the estate. The ornately decorated shelves reached all the way to the high ceilings, accessible by a wheeled ladder attached to the top shelf. It looked like something out of _Beauty and the Beast_. Malcolm slowed his steps towards the desk, taking it all in. It truly was beautiful. The books looked old, most of them leatherbound or cloth covered. If Malcolm truly was inheriting the estate, he could certainly see himself spending a lot of time in that library.

He refocused his attention on the desk, which was just as ornate as the shelves. It matched the dining room table, both in the design of the clawed legs and the carvings on the edges. But sitting off to the side, just as Caswell had said, was a landline. Malcolm tried not to focus on how much the phone looked like the one in his own basement - the one that Watkins had called. He pulled the number of one of his family’s lawyers back up, and dialed.

The call wouldn’t go through. A busy signal was all Malcolm got. Brows furrowing, he tried again. The busy signal remained. He tried calling a different number, but got the same result. No call was going through.

“Is everything alright, sir?”

Malcolm jumped at the voice right behind him, quickly turning around to face Caswell, who was standing only a foot away from him. He couldn’t move back, being trapped by the desk. Malcolm slid to the side, that being his only escape route. Luckily, Caswell stayed where he was, giving him a strangely knowing look.

“My calls won’t go through,” Malcolm said. “But I have a feeling you knew that would happen.” He took another step away from Caswell. “What’s going on?”

“Simply the storm, sir,” Caswell replied, even waving his hand dismissively. “It’s a frequent occurrence here.”

“But the landline wire is underground,” Malcolm said. It didn’t make sense for a storm to impact an underground wire.

“Have you signed the papers yet, sir?” Caswell asked, completely disregarding what Malcolm said.

Malcolm waited for a moment before replying, “You should never sign anything without having a lawyer go over it first.” He forced another smile, but couldn’t help but glance out of the library and straight down the hall, through the front entryway, sitting room, dining room, and into the study. It was an instinct that had only grown stronger over the past twenty years, to seek out Gil whenever he just knew that something was wrong.

“I assure you, there is no need,” Caswell said. He took another step closer to Malcolm, who couldn’t help reflexively taking another step back. “You really must sign them as soon as you can.”

“Why?” he asked. “Why does it matter that I sign them right now?”

“The longer you wait, the harder it will be,” Caswell replied. He took another step closer to Malcolm, putting them at opposite ends of the desk. “With all due respect, sir, I think it’s time you accept your inheritance.” Something about his face changed, becoming dark and dangerous, although Malcolm couldn’t put his finger on what. It sent shivers down his spine and spiked his heart rate.

The papers were sitting on the desk, and Malcolm was grabbing a pen without even knowing it. It was like he didn’t even have control of his own hands.

“What’s going on?” he asked, voice shaking, as he signed the two documents. Malcolm tried to stop himself, but he was paralyzed, his hands acting without his permission. “What’s happening?” As the pen fell from his fingers, both documents signed, Malcolm felt a pressure all around him, like he was underwater or trapped under a heavy blanket. He was breathing and suffocating at the same time. But despite the pressure, something left him. It felt like something had been pulled from his soul, and remained around him but just out of reach. Malcolm could not explain the terror he felt.

Caswell snagged the documents the moment Malcolm had finished signing them. The smirk on his face quickly smoothed back out into his blank face. The paralysis was gone, but Malcolm still couldn’t control his hands with how much they were shaking. He clenched them into fists, holding them close to his body as if he were in pain. How had they betrayed him? How did that happen?

“Whatever do you mean?” Caswell asked, his expression the perfect picture of innocence. “You signed the documents, securing the continued employment of myself and the groundskeeper, and ensuring that you get all that is coming to you. I suggest you find the instructions quickly now, young sir. The estate will not wait forever for you to accept your inheritance.” The man turned swiftly on his heel and walked away, the documents in hand, while Malcolm just focused on breathing.

What the hell had just happened? His hands shook more than ever as he tried to run them through his hair in a self-calming gesture. It didn’t work. Malcolm tried to take a deep breath, but it was shuddering. It didn’t feel like he could get enough air in. He needed Gil.

Malcolm forced his legs to move, as unsteady as they felt underneath him. He focused on putting one foot in front of the other, each step faltering and weak. He needed Gil to hold him up.

“Gil,” he called out, his voice much weaker than he’d intended it to be. Malcolm took a deep breath as he stumbled from the entryway into the sitting room. “Gil!” he called out again, eyes staring down the rooms and into the study.

“Bright,” Gil called out in reply, appearing at the doorway to the study. His eyes widened when he saw Malcolm, and rushed through the dining room to get to him. It was all Malcolm could do not to collapse in the man’s arms. “Kid, what’s wrong?” he asked, taking a light hold of Malcolm’s shaking arms. Gil glanced over Malcolm, as if to make sure he wasn’t injured in any way.

“What’s going on?” he heard Dani ask from the doorway, but he couldn’t bring himself to look at her. Malcolm just stared straight ahead, which happened to be straight at Gil’s sweater. He took a grip on the material, feeling the warmth underneath his fingers, and the soft fabric filling his hands.

“You gotta talk to me, kid, what happened?” Gil asked again, sounding increasingly concerned. Malcolm finally looked at him, eyes jerking up to meet Gil’s gaze.

“Gil, I don’t- something happened- I don’t know- I can’t-.”

“Hey, hey, it’s alright,” Gil insisted. He gently lowered Malcolm into one of the chairs, keeping his grip on him all the same. “Just breathe, kid.” Gil crouched down to be at eye level with him, and put one of his hands on the back of Malcolm’s neck in the same calming gesture that had worked for the past twenty years. “I’m right here, I’ve got you,” he said, just loud enough for Malcolm to hear him. Out of the corner of his eye, Malcolm could see Dani and JT stepping back, but still staying in the room.

In the safety of Gil’s arms, Malcolm closed his eyes. He was safe with Gil. Malcolm focused entirely on his breathing, knowing that nothing was going to happen, and he was free to let his guard down enough to focus on getting each breath back under control.

A minute later, Malcolm finally felt like he was no longer in danger of hyperventilating. He took a final deep breath, content with the fact that it was no longer shuddering.

“What happened?” Gil asked once more, his voice gentle and calm. Dani and JT crept slightly closer, their expressions clearly showing their concern.

“I went to go find Caswell and a landline,” Malcolm started. His voice wasn’t as strong as he would've liked it to be, but at least it wasn’t shaking. “But he found me, and showed me where it was, but I couldn’t make a call go through, not to a lawyer, not to anyone. He said it was because of the storm, but that doesn’t make sense because the wire is underground.” Malcolm glanced between Dani and JT, seeing their faces of confusion and intrigue. “But then Caswell wanted me to sign the documents anyway, and I-,” he broke off. It sounded insane. He was going to sound crazy. They were going to think he’d snapped and completely lost his grip on reality. But was that perhaps the truth? Maybe he really was just going crazy, and nothing had happened like he thought it did. What he thought happened was impossible. Malcolm must have actually lost it. The stress of everything that had happened in the past year had become too much, and he’d gone insane. He was more deranged than he’d ever thought. Maybe he needed to be put away.

Malcolm squeezed his eyes shut against sudden tears and looked away. It was too late to lie to his team about what had happened, but they were going to see just how much Malcolm had lost it. They would never believe him. Malcolm didn’t even believe himself.

“Hey,” Gil gently said, the hand on the back of his neck squeezing in reassurance. “Kid, you gotta talk to me,” he repeated. He sounded scared. That forced Malcolm to open his eyes. He took in another deep breath, just barely forcing his tears back, but he refrained from making eye contact, just in case.

“I’m gonna sound crazy,” he muttered. “Well, more crazy than normal,” he added. Malcolm was well aware that he sounded slightly deranged on a semi-regular basis. “You’re not gonna believe me,” he clarified.

“No,” Gil immediately responded, his voice firm enough to make Malcolm look at him. “No matter what you say, I am going to believe you. I know that you know the difference between any hallucination and reality. If you believe that something happened, then I am going to believe you. We all are, right?” Gil said, glancing quickly back at Dani and JT.

“I’ve known you long enough to trust your crazy,” JT said.

“Same here,” Dani added. She took a seat in the lush chair next to him, while JT stood just off to Gil’s left side. “We will believe you, I promise,” she said. Malcolm knew they all thought they were telling the truth, but he didn’t expect them to actually believe him when he said what happened. Malcolm didn’t even know if he could believe himself. Still, he nodded, then looked away from all three of them to tell what happened.

“We were standing at the desk in the library, and then there was a pen in my hand, but I didn’t remember grabbing it.” He lowered his voice, knowing that what he was about to say next could change things forever. “Then, I was signing the papers, but it wasn’t me doing it. I couldn’t control my own hand. It was like someone or something was forcing me to do it, and no matter how hard I fought against it, I couldn’t control my own hands. And there was this pressure that I felt all around me, that I still feel, and it feels like part of me is missing, and I have to be going insane.” Malcolm’s voice almost broke on the last words. He let his gaze fall to his lap as he focused on holding back his tears. It had never gotten this bad before. Of course, he’d hallucinated time and time and again, and sometimes he couldn’t quite tell whether or not it was real, but once it was gone, he always knew. But not this time. Now, he still could’ve sworn it had happened, no matter how impossible it was. That had to be a hallmark of a true departure from reality, just like Dr. Le Deux had always been nervous would happen to him. He had to be well and truly insane. After everything he’d been through, he’d finally snapped for good.

The silence around him was just confirmation that it was gone. The family that he’d built out of his team was going to be gone. There was just no way that it had happened, and they all knew it. Dani and JT were going to think he was a freak once again, and they would be right. Gil was probably going to have him committed. The fear in the back of his mind that he’d always had that he would end up in Claremont as a patient was finally going to be realized, and he deserved it. If he truly couldn’t tell the difference between hallucination and reality, then Claremont was where he deserved to be.

“We’re going to figure this out,” Gil finally said, the first one to speak. He squeezed the back of Malcolm’s neck once again. “Kid, look at me,” he gently said. Slowly, Malcolm lifted his gaze up to Gil. He couldn’t even think about looking at either Dani or JT. They were never going to look at him the same again. “No matter what is going on, I believe you.”

“How can you believe me? I don’t even believe me,” Malcolm cried out. He looked away from his team once again.

“Hey,” Dani gently called out, leaning over to catch Malcolm’s gaze. “Have you ever thought a hallucination was actually, truly, real before, after it was over?” After a moment, Malcolm shook his head. He had always been able to tell the difference before, even if in the moment his fear would always override his rational brain. “But this time it’s different?” Malcolm nodded again.

“It felt so real,” he admitted, finally looking over at JT too.

“Then maybe it was,” Dani continued. “I don’t know what happened, but I know you wouldn’t make this up or let anyone convince you to do something that you didn’t want to do.” That wasn’t entirely true. His father could get him to do a lot of things that he didn’t want to do, but outside of his father, she wasn’t wrong. Malcolm was known for being incredibly stubborn and sticking his heels in.

“Not everything in this world makes sense,” Gil said. He finally let his hand fall from Malcolm’s neck and stood up, standing side by side with JT. “We can’t explain everything, and I know we have all felt that something about this place is wrong.”

JT scoffed and nodded. “Ain’t that the truth. This place gives me the creeps.”

“We’re gonna figure this out,” Gil repeated. He held out his hand to help Malcolm to stand. After a brief moment, he took it. Malcolm still felt like there was a suffocating pressure around him, and he still felt like a part of him was missing, but with his team right there, believing him no matter how crazy he sounded, it was a little more bearable.

“Have you found anything useful yet?” he asked, his voice small. It felt odd to just move on, but Malcolm knew they had to.

“Not yet,” JT replied. “Everything we’ve found so far is totally normal, which doesn’t help at all.”

The four of them moved together back to the study, this time, with Gil bringing up the rear, keeping Malcolm in the middle of the group. But that wasn’t the only change that Malcolm noticed.

“Were those candles lit before?” he asked, pointing towards the dining room table. There were candles set at various intervals, all of which were lit. The chandelier was lit too. Malcolm could smell the burning dust. There wasn’t any sort of stool or ladder around the room for someone to have been able to get up there to light them, and Malcolm couldn’t see any sort of pulley system that could have been used to bring the chandelier down to a manageable height to light the candles.

The silence that greeted Malcolm’s question was all the answer he needed. He wasn’t ready to accept it yet, but maybe he hadn’t been going crazy after all.

A flash of lightning through the massive windows made all four of them jump. Malcolm cringed at the clap of thunder that followed. The rain continued to beat down on the estate, and the four of them continued on into the study. Everything in there was untouched. The bills they’d looked through were still right where they’d left them, and the stacks of boxes were still scattered haphazardly throughout the room. Gil, Dani, and JT plopped right back down onto the floor, picking up right where they had left off. Malcolm sat back down in the massive desk chair and took another deep breath. The pressure on his chest refused to abate, but it wasn’t real. Malcolm could still take deep, full breaths. It was a phantom pressure, likely brought on by stress and fear. It would go away, Malcolm just needed to calm down and focus on the things he could actually do to figure out what was going on, rather than dwell on how everything felt so wrong.

Malcolm looked back down at the beautiful desk. It had several drawers, but Malcolm hadn’t looked in any of them yet. They weren’t locked, so it was easy enough to pull them open. The top drawer, predictably, had simple office supplies. The second one had scratch paper, envelopes, and stamps. Malcolm reached down for the bottom drawer and pulled it open. That drawer had only a single, folded piece of paper in it. Malcolm picked it up and held it on top of the desk. It wasn’t just any printer paper. It was high quality, and it was closed with a wax stamp. Malcolm rolled his eyes. He couldn’t find it in himself to be at all surprised by that.

“What’s that you’ve got?” Gil asked. Malcolm glanced up at him briefly before looking back down at the paper in his hands.

“I’m not sure,” he muttered. Carefully, Malcolm pried the wax seal off, and opened the letter. Right at the top, he could see it was addressed to him.

_“Malcolm Whitly, for a Whitly you will always be, I hereby give to you, my heir and successor, all that I own, the estate and all of its secrets. You may find yourself with some memories that are not your own, but it is perhaps best if some things are left buried in the past. I suggest you don’t search for them. This is all rightfully yours, but your inheritance cannot be claimed without several conditions. Should you wish to accept who you are and all that is coming to you, you must prove yourself worthy of it. You will stay here, in this estate, all night, and face it. If you survive the night, you will have proven yourself a worthy successor to the Whitly legacy. If you wish to protect your loved ones, you will stay here alone. If something happens to them because you let them stay here, the fault will fall to you. Your signature is binding. You cannot leave the estate until dawn. Only by facing your fears can you embrace that which dwells in the darkness. Perhaps you will finally come to understand and embrace your true heritage as well. After all, you will always be a Whitly. You cannot hide from who you are. It is only a matter of time.”_

Malcolm let the letter fall to the desk, his hand tremor reappearing with full force. He took a shuddering breath in and out. Despite the warmth of the room, Malcolm couldn’t suppress a full body shiver. Francis Whitly’s signature stared up at him from the bottom of the letter, written out in brown ink, like dried blood.

“Bright, you okay?” Gil asked. “What’s wrong?” He stood once again from his place on the floor amongst the bills and other contents of the boxes to come around to the desk. Gil put his hand on Malcolm’s shaking shoulder, but Malcolm couldn’t tear his eyes away from the letter.

“It’s, uh, I don’t know,” he stammered. Gil picked it up, but left his other hand on Malcolm’s shoulder. After a moment, Gil sighed, and let the letter fall back onto the desk.

“This just keeps getting better and better,” he muttered. He rubbed his eyes and shook his head.

“What is it, boss?” JT asked. Gil motioned towards the letter. JT stood and grabbed it, then held it while both he and Dani read it.

The man was dead. Whatever he had been implying in the letter, it didn’t matter. He was dead, and couldn’t do anything. Any threat, no matter how thinly veiled, didn’t matter. Malcolm was overreacting. He was creeped out by everything that had happened, and was just overreacting. Like Gil had said, everything was going to be fine.

“What the hell?” JT muttered. He chuckled, which took Malcolm’s attention. “Your family is so messed up, bro, for real.” It was obvious, a given, irrefutable, but JT saying it so casually made Malcolm smile nonetheless.

“Don’t let me ever complain about my family again,” Dani added, eyes wide. “Is this signed in blood?” she asked, pointing to the signature. Malcolm just shrugged. That had been his thought too, but it wasn’t exactly their most pressing concern.

“I say we leave,” Gil said. He gave Malcolm’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze as he spoke. “Let’s just go, and come back later with lawyers. We don’t have to play whatever game this is.”

“That sounds good to me,” JT immediately responded. Dani nodded too, but Malcolm was filled with dread. He had a feeling it wasn’t going to work, but he couldn’t just not try.

“Okay,” he softly replied. Malcolm stood up from the desk and tried to take a deep breath - that pressure on his chest wasn’t going away, making him constantly feel like he wasn’t getting enough air, even though his rational mind knew that he was, that the pressure was all psychological and there was nothing stopping him from getting full breaths.

With Gil in front, and JT and Dani behind him, the four of them made their way back to the front door. Malcolm could’ve sworn that all of the eyes on the portraits were following him. He tried to shake off the feeling as he followed Gil straight out the front door, into the pouring rain. The jog to Gil’s car was colder than it should’ve been. The rain of most summer storms was at least lukewarm, but this rain was cold, almost freezing.

Malcolm let out a breath he didn’t know he had been holding as he closed the door to Gil’s car behind him. He was out of the house. He was going to be fine. They were all going to be fine.

“Let’s get out of here,” he muttered, although it came out much more pleading than Malcolm had intended.

“Yeah, kid, we’re going,” Gil muttered in reply. He put the car in reverse and backed out, and was soon leading the four of them - Gil and Malcolm in the LeMans, and JT and Dani in her car - back to the front gate. Gil put the code into the gate, and it opened up for them just like it was supposed to. Malcolm was finally starting to relax when it all went to hell.

The moment they crossed the moat, officially leaving Whitly Estate property, that pressure that Malcolm felt on his chest became a crushing weight. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t even take a breath in. Each attempt was a clipped wheeze, popping in time with his failed breaths. In the back of his mind, Malcolm remembered Jin sounding the same way when his lung collapsed.

“Kid, what’s going on?” he could faintly hear Gil asking. The car stopped moving. Gil sounded panicked, but Malcolm was too busy panicking himself over the fact that he couldn’t freaking breathe. It was real, his chest wasn’t expanding. He couldn’t get the words out to tell Gil what was happening, but if he didn’t do something soon, he was going to die. “Malcolm, what’s happening?”

There was no physical reason for any of it to be happening, but it was happening nonetheless. The letter had said his signature was binding, and he had signed the two documents, willingly or not. The letter also said he had to stay on estate property. He had to go back. Malcolm’s fear continued to build as he scrambled for the door and stumbled out of the car. Gil was getting out and coming after him, and maybe JT and Dani were too, but all Malcolm could focus on was getting back across the moat. Luckily, the gate was still open. The moment Malcolm stumbled across it, his chest expanded once again, flooding his body with oxygen. Malcolm fell to the ground, taking deep, gasping breaths. He was lightheaded, and his head was pounding, but he was still alive. Darkness was still encroaching at the edge of his vision, and the rain was soaking him to the bone, but he wasn’t dying anymore.

_He was on his back, the beautiful stars in the clear night sky obscured by the hulking mass on top of him, pinning him to the ground. He couldn’t breathe. He saw his hands - not his hands, slimmer hands, long nails painted and fingers adorned with rings - reaching up to try to scratch at the weight on top of him, but it didn’t work. The weight on his chest was too much, and the hands around his throat continued to squeeze._

_“You shouldn’t have tried to run,” the man on top of him said with a dark chuckle. “No one leaves the Whitly Estate.”_

_The man’s face had familiar features, but he couldn’t recognize him. It was too dark to tell, then it was too dark to see anything at all as he passed into a sleep that he would never wake up from._

Malcolm gasped as daylight flooded back to him. He wasn’t on his back, he was on his knees in the mud, one hand on the ground, holding himself up, while the other was clenched around his throat, grabbing at phantom hands.

“Bright, please,” Dani called out. She sounded scared. His breaths finally evening out, Malcolm looked up at his team. They were all soaking wet, the rain still pouring down on them, but all three of them were looking at him with terror in their eyes. Gil was kneeling next to him, a comforting hand on Malcolm’s back. They both might have been crying, but that might have been the rain. Malcolm couldn’t tell.

“Oh, kid,” Gil breathed out. He pulled Malcolm close to him, repeating “you’re okay” again and again. Malcolm didn’t know if Gil was doing it for him, or for himself. He wasn’t going to complain. The pressure on his chest was back to what it had been before they tried to leave, but at least he could breathe.

“I’m okay,” he finally confirmed, but he didn’t make a move to extricate himself from Gil’s warm embrace. “But I think we have a problem.”


	3. Chapter 3

When it came to Malcolm - to the whole Whitly family, really - Gil didn’t think that there was anything that could surprise him. He’d been through so much with them that he just couldn’t be phased anymore. At least, that was what he’d thought. The kid inheriting a mystery mansion certainly stretched it, but Gil could still handle it without much surprise. Said mansion being cursed, or whatever it was, however was a step too far.

“Let’s get you back inside,” Gil said, helping Malcolm to stand. His arms still wrapped around the boy, Gil brought them both back to the front door, which was mercifully unlocked. JT and Dani followed them in. “You two, go find Caswell,” he told them. “No splitting up.” They both nodded, then followed his orders and began jogging down the rooms.

“There’s a fireplace in the library,” Malcolm said, his voice shaking. He took a shivering step in that direction, forcing Gil to follow him - Gil was not going to be separated from his kid if he could help it. But the moment they stepped into the library, Gil felt the heat. The fireplace was already lit. This time, he chose to ignore the creepiness, and focus on that being one less thing he had to do.

Gil grabbed a blanket off the back of the couch and brought it over to the fireplace. It would be large enough to cover them both.

“Let’s get some of these wet things off,” he muttered. Gil pulled off his own sports coat and tossed it to the side before helping Malcolm’s shaking arms out of his soaked jacket.

“What are the chances there’s some spare clothes here?” Malcolm asked him, a forced smile on his face. Gil just scoffed, tossing Malcolm’s jacket to join the coat. The tie came off too, but their socks were thankfully dry enough to remain. Just being by the fire, Gil was already starting to feel much better. He wasn’t too cold anymore, and his clothes were beginning to dry. The same couldn’t be said for Malcolm. He was still shaking, hugging his knees to his chest, with goosebumps all over the exposed skin of his neck and wrists. The fire was right there, warm and blazing, but it wasn’t helping Malcolm the way it was helping Gil. Was that part of whatever curse they had gotten caught up in?

“Come here,” Gil muttered, sitting down behind the shaking kid. He pulled Malcolm close to his chest and wrapped his arms around him, then wrapped the blanket around the both. It wasn’t skin to skin contact, which would have been the most effective method, but it wasn’t quite necessary to go that far. Normally, Malcolm would at least put up some token refusal, even if he didn’t actually mean it, but not this time. He just leaned back, letting Gil warm him up. Gil tried not to be more concerned than he already was.

The two of them sat in silence for several minutes. Slowly, so slowly, Malcolm began to warm back up. His shivers lessened, and his skin wasn’t quite as ice to the touch as it had been. His clothes were drying a little slower, but there was only so much Gil could do about that.

“What happened out there?” Gil finally asked. He could figure it came down to the house, that it wasn’t a physical thing, but supernatural in origin, but he still wanted to know what exactly happened to his kid. Those sounds weren’t likely to leave Gil’s memory any time soon.

“I don’t know,” Malcolm muttered, his voice sounded much more fearful and broken than Gil was comfortable with. “Once we got off the property, I just couldn’t breathe,” he said. “My chest couldn’t expand, I couldn’t get any air in. That pressure that I’ve felt since signing those documents just got so much worse. It was like there was a truck on my chest, crushing me.” He held his hand in a fist, right over his heart. “I remembered the letter said something about my signature being binding, and telling me that I had to stay here all night. The only thing I could think to do was get back onto estate property, and hope that it would go away. It worked.” If it was even possible, Malcolm folded back in on himself even more, becoming even smaller.

Gil wasn’t surprised. If this was all being caused by something supernatural, then that made enough sense to Gil. But that wasn’t all of it. Once Malcolm had collapsed back onto the property, he had gone blank. He had been breathing again, but he stared straight ahead, seemingly frozen, unaware of anything that was going on around him. What had that been?

“What about after?” Gil gently asked. “We all ran up to you, and you were breathing again, but you didn’t seem to recognize that any of us were there. Dani even shook your shoulder, and nothing happened. You were gone for a minute. What was that?”

After a moment, Malcolm responded, “I don’t know.” His voice was small, and so quiet that Gil had to strain to hear it. “I saw something, but it was different. It wasn’t a normal hallucination, but I know it didn’t actually happen.”

“What do you mean, kid?” he asked. Gil accentuated his words by holding onto Malcolm even tighter. No matter what it was that the kid had to say, Gil needed to make sure he knew that he was going to be believed.

Malcolm took a deep breath before continuing. “Everything faded away, and it was night. I was on my back, but I don’t think I was myself. I saw my hands, and they weren’t mine, they were a woman’s. There was a man on top of me, pinning me down and strangling me. I didn’t recognize him, but he told me that I shouldn’t have tried to run, because no one leaves the Whitly Estate. I thought I passed out, but then it was day again. I could feel the rain and I could hear Dani saying my name. That’s when I looked up and saw you.” Malcolm wrapped himself up even tighter, and fell silent. He was staring straight ahead into the fire.

Gil didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what was going on, and he had no idea how to fix it. Luckily, he was saved from having to reply by JT and Dani emerging from the entryway, Caswell in tow. JT had a firm grip on the man’s bicep, and Caswell did not look happy about it.

“I’ve got him, boss,” JT practically growled, shoving Caswell forward. “Now tell us what the hell you did to Bright,” he ordered.

Malcolm stood, and wordlessly accepted the blanket when Gil offered it to him. He wrapped it around himself, and glared up at Caswell with a mixture of fear and anger.

“What’s going on?” he asked, his voice remarkably steady. Gil stood right next to him, ready to jump in front of the boy to protect him should the need arise, but letting Malcolm fight the battle that was definitely his to fight. JT stayed behind Caswell, blocking the entrance to the front entryway, while Dani moved behind Malcolm and Gil, closer to the fire - she was still dripping wet.

“I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” Caswell replied. A loud clap of thunder accentuated his words. The clouds were getting darker, turning the afternoon into a faux night.

“In my experience, whenever people say they don’t know what I’m talking about as their first reply, they always know what I’m talking about,” Malcolm responded, glaring at the man. “What did you do to me?”

“You read the documents, you signed them,” Caswell said with a shrug. “I haven’t done anything to you. This is only what you have done to yourself.”

“I didn’t sign them!” Malcolm shouted at the man, taking a step forward. “Something _made_ me sign them, and I want to know what it was. I want to know why I’m trapped here, and how. I want to know what the hell these things I’m seeing are, and what is going on here. If I own this estate, and you work for me, then you better tell me.”

Malcolm sounded strong and determined, and Gil had no doubt that he was, but he could also hear the fear underlying each syllable. Gil had known the kid long enough to know when he was scared, and right now, Malcolm was terrified - he was just doing a very good job at hiding it. But none of that seemed to matter to Caswell. The man looked utterly bored.

“You found the instructions, did you not?” Caswell asked. He sounded more annoyed than anything else. “In the bottom drawer?”

“The letter?” Malcolm confirmed. Caswell gave a single nod. “Those weren’t instructions,” he scoffed.

Caswell reached into his coat pocket and withdrew the very letter. He held it back out to Malcolm, who practically ripped it from the man’s hands.

“I suggest you read it again. All of the answers that you seek can be found within. You know the truth, you just refuse to accept it. Now, I have other tasks to accomplish, as do you. I suggest you get to them.” Caswell turned on his heel and walked back towards the entryway, but was blocked by JT, his arms crossed. After a moment, Gil nodded at JT, who then moved away and let the man pass. JT immediately crossed over to the fire, and gave a content sigh at its warmth.

“He gives me the creeps,” Dani muttered. “We went to find him, but we couldn’t. And then we just turn around and he’s _right there_.”

“Dude appeared out of nowhere, I swear,” JT agreed as he warmed his hands by the fire. Gil just shook his head and turned his attention back to Malcolm, who was gripping the letter with a shaking hand. He sighed.

“Let’s go over it again,” Gil said, leaning over Malcolm’s shoulder. His hand still shaking, Malcolm unfolded the letter and held it out.

“It says I have to stay here all night and that my signature is binding,” Malcolm repeated. “And get memories that aren’t mine. That’s just fantastic.” He handed the letter to Gil and sat down on the couch with his head in his hands. Malcolm ran his hands through his wet hair before breathing out heavily through his nose. “You have to go.”

“What?” Dani scoffed. “If you’re staying, we’re staying.”

“That’s what teams do, bro,” JT added with a shake of his head.

“I can’t let you do that,” Malcolm said with a sardonic smile and a shrug. “We’ve already seen that the estate is going to keep me here. I don’t know how, but it will. If everything my uncle wrote down is true, then you guys have to go. You can’t stay, it isn’t safe.” He looked pleadingly between them, but Gil wasn’t having it.

“Not on your life, kid,” he said. Gil sat down on the couch next to him, with barely an inch between them. “It doesn’t say we have to leave. Your dead uncle can say all he wants about whose fault it is if something happens, but he can’t actually make any of that be true.” Ghosts and the supernatural were one thing, but assigning blame was different. There wasn’t any physicality to that. If something bad happened to Gil or Dani or JT because they stayed with the kid, then it was because of the supernatural, not because of Malcolm. “We’re staying,” he reiterated.

“I can’t let you-.”

“You can’t stop us,” Dani interrupted. “I can’t pretend that I understand what the hell is going on here, if it's ghosts or what, but I do know that we’re a team, and we’re leaving you here alone.”

“Second all of that,” JT said. “Except for the ghost thing. I don’t know what it is, but there’s definitely a logical explanation here.”

Malcolm nodded with a real smile, albeit small. “If ghosts were real, then I think my family would know by now.” Gil smiled and rested his hand on the kid’s shoulder, giving it a reassuring squeeze.

“No matter what’s going on, we’re with you,” Gil repeated. He ducked his head to catch Malcolm’s gaze. “We are not leaving you here alone. If you can’t leave, then none of us can leave. No one gets left behind.” He moved his hand back and forth on the kid’s neck, his heart breaking at the thinly veiled look of shock on Malcolm’s face. The kid clearly didn’t seem to grasp how important he was to all of them. Nothing was going to take Gil from Malcolm’s side, not ghosts, or fear, or arguments, or a serial killer father.

“Okay,” Malcolm finally said, giving a small nod to them all. “Then I think it’s time we find out everything about this house that we can. I don’t care what the letter says, I want to know what’s happened here.” He stood up from the couch - blanket still wrapped around his shoulders - and made his way over to the massive bookshelves. “There was an order to Francis Whitly’s madness. Those piles of bills and boxes in the study didn’t make any sense to us, but they made sense to him. We just have to figure out his pattern.”

JT walked over and joined him. “A family with this much money, there’s gotta be some sort of family history book, right?”

“There should be,” Malcolm muttered in reply. He was already scanning the rows of books, his young eyes able to quickly pick out titles from far away much better than Gil ever could.

“What else are we looking for, kid?” he asked, coming to stand next to him.

“Anything about local history,” Malcolm replied. “This house looks like it was built in the 1860s or 70s, so I’d start there.”

Dani came up to join them. “Do you know anything about your father’s side of the family at all?” she asked. “Didn’t you ever have to do some sort of genealogy project in high school?”

Malcolm cringed. “No one wanted to read about the genealogy of a serial killer. I always stuck to the Milton side for those.” JT chuckled and nodded as he continued to scan the shelves for something useful. “All I know is that the Whitlys moved to Virginia from England in 1654, eventually made their way to New York, and the name means ‘from the white meadow’.”

Gil was only half paying attention. There were so many books on the high shelves that it was almost dizzying. He scanned them carefully, trying to be sure not to miss anything important.

“How about a yearbook?” JT asked. “That’s gotta be something.” Gil pried his attention away from the neverending shelves and looked over at JT, who was pulling a yearbook from the bottom shelf.

“It’s a start,” Malcolm muttered. The four of them gathered around the desk as Malcolm began flipping through the pages. It was Martin’s yearbook, from the year he graduated high school. Nothing seemed too out of the ordinary, except for Martin, who still had that psychotic smile at age eighteen. But as Malcolm flipped through the pages, Gil caught a glimpse of something.

“Wait a second,” he said, pulling the book away from Malcolm and closer to himself. They had gotten to the end of the book, where parents could send in messages to be immortalized in the yearbook for their children. They would certainly need to see if Malcolm’s grandparents had written anything for Martin, but something else had caught Gil’s eye. He went back a few pages, to what looked like a memorial page. “‘Rest in peace, Holly Parker’,” Gil read out. He scanned the page. “Killed while she was out for a jog,” he muttered. “Bright, what are the chances-.”

“Find newspapers,” Malcolm interrupted. “Francis would’ve kept all of his newspapers. There has to be something about that murder in them.” Gil put his hand on Malcolm’s shoulder and gave him a concerned glance. True, the kid’s father had already murdered at least twenty-three people, but that didn’t make it any less difficult to find out he had potentially killed another one. Malcolm’s hand was shaking again, but he nodded nonetheless, indicating that he was fine.

“I found newspapers,” Dani said, but she sounded confused. Gil looked over at her. She was standing by the filing cabinet, and had three drawers open. “There’s tons of newspapers in here, but they’re not arranged in any particular order. The dates cover decades and decades, but they’re not organized at all.”

Malcolm opened his mouth to say something, then closed it and looked over at her quizzically, like he did when he was putting pieces of a puzzle together.

“What are you thinkin’, kid?” he asked, trying to hide the growing smile on his face. Malcolm glanced at him, a smile forming on his own face as well.

“What are all the headlines about in those top drawers?” he asked.

“Boring stuff, really,” Dani responded. “Something about a bake sale, a new supermarket in town, nothing important.”

Malcolm spun on his heel to face JT, who was the closest to the bookshelves. “What else is there on that bottom shelf?” he asked, his smile growing.

“What is it, Bright?” JT asked with a groan as he lowered himself back down to the floor. “You’re the one who can see this bottom shelf at eye level.” Gil chuckled, and even Malcolm smiled at the jab about his height. It took a very long time for Malcolm to be comfortable being shorter than most other men, so Gil was glad that the kid could laugh about it now, especially since that had been just another thing to make him even more of a target for bullies during high school. There had been a time when the kid was still convinced he would grow more, despite being at an age where his growth plates had likely already fused. But he’d finally accepted it, and learned to be okay with it.

“Just list off a few of the titles on the bottom shelf,” Malcolm asked of him. Gil wanted to repeat his question, but he knew the kid would say what he was thinking only when he knew whether or not he was right - and even if Gil didn’t want to admit it, Malcolm was almost always right.

JT sighed, but began to list off a few. “There’s some Niccolo Machiavelli, Dale Carnegie, Edgar Allan Poe, and-,” he broke off. “I don’t remember this book being pulled out before,” he said, grabbing the book and standing back up. It was a local history book, exactly what they had been looking for. No one said anything about how the book got pulled out from the shelf, almost far enough to fall out. No one could explain it rationally, and no one was going to insult JT by accusing the detective of having a bad memory.

“Does this fit with your theory?” Gil asked, getting them back on track.

“What theory?” Dani chimed in. She walked away from the filing cabinets, leaving the top drawers open.

“Francis seems to have been keeping the most important things at the bottom. The letter was in the bottom drawer of the desk in the study. Those are all very important authors that JT listed, along with the books we actually needed. We only saw boring and unimportant things in the piles of boxes and bills because we were starting from the top. The top of the filing cabinet has only boring and unimportant headlines. I’ll bet you the bottom has what we’re looking for,” Malcolm said with a smirk.

Gil was beaming. After seeing his kid so scared, and suffocating, it was amazing to see him in his element, putting these puzzle pieces together and thriving despite the chaos of the situation. Every time Gil thought he couldn’t ever get any more proud of his kid, he was wrong. And Gil would never stop being proud of him.

“What?” Malcolm asked him, clearly having noticed his distraction. His blue eyes were big and wide, as if he was concerned that he’d missed something.

“It’s nothin’, kid,” Gil replied, rubbing his shoulder once again. Him being proud of his kid was nothing new.

All of their attention was stolen by the filing cabinet. Dani had turned around, to go back and check in the bottom drawers for what they were looking for, only for them to watch as all three top drawers slowly closed by themselves, creaking as they did so. If it was just that, maybe they could’ve shrugged it off like they’d been shrugging off everything else. Once the top drawers had closed, the three bottom drawers began opening on their own.

They were frozen in their places, staring at what had just happened. They had seen it, but they couldn’t quite believe it. Their silence was covered up by the continuing onslaught of the storm. It certainly didn’t seem like it was going to let up any time soon.

“What’s your logical explanation for that?” Dani asked, her voice barely more than a whisper.

“Yeah, I don’t got one,” JT admitted. He let out a low whistle and shook his head, arms crossed. “I am not dealin’ with this today, absolutely not.”

“I don’t think we have much of a choice anymore,” Malcolm muttered, walking over to the cabinets and beginning to rifle through them - he finally tossed the blanket off his shoulders and back onto the couch as he walked over. Gil could hear him mumbling the headlines under his breath, but he couldn’t make any of them out. “Here we go,” Malcolm said. He brought the newspaper back over to the desk, laying it out for the four of them to see.

“‘High school senior murdered, chest cut open with a scalpel’,” Gil read aloud. He looked back over at the kid, whose eyes were closed, his head hanging.

“That definitely sounds like my father,” he said. Gil put his hand on the kid’s back and rubbed up and down a few times.

“I’m sorry, kid,” he said. What else was there for him to say? ‘I’m sorry your serial killer father is even worse than we thought?’

Malcolm sighed and looked up at him with a grimace. “It’s not like I can say I’m surprised. At least we know who she is, and hopefully, if nothing else comes from all of this, we can bring Holly’s family justice, even if it’s forty years late.” He shook his head and looked away, just as he always did when he felt guilty. The kid was blaming himself.

“This isn’t on you, bro,” JT said. He’d picked up on it almost as fast as Gil had, and had been quicker to say something. Gil was proud.

“I’ve always known my father had more victims, beyond the twenty-three, beyond the Girl In The Box. I haven’t looked for them the way I should have, I haven’t-.”

“It’s not your job to look for them,” Dani interrupted. She sounded shocked, with something akin to hurt in her voice that Gil couldn’t place. “You can’t live every waking moment of your life trying to atone for sins you didn’t commit.”

“You could live your whole life trying to fix what The Surgeon did, and it would never be enough,” Gil said. Malcolm turned to him, looking like a kicked puppy. “You will never know everything that your father did, and you’re never going to be able to get justice for everyone, and that’s okay.” He stressed the last two words, both with his voice and with his hand, which had once again migrated to the kid’s neck. “The best thing you can do for your father’s victims and their families is to do what you’re already doing: living your life trying to stop killers before they become the next Surgeon. Martin killed Holly Parker years and years before you were even born. You take so much on yourself already. Don’t take this on too.” Gil squeezed the back of the kid’s neck, hoping to get him to make eye contact. After a moment, Malcolm nodded, but Gil could tell that his heart wasn’t in it.

“Let’s keep digging into this place,” he said.

That was exactly what they did, but it brought them more questions than answers. The books they needed were all found on the bottom shelves, just as Malcolm had predicted they would be. Dani stuck with the newspapers in the filing cabinet, while Gil, JT, and Malcolm sifted through the family and local history books.

“Over ninety percent of these newspaper headlines are about various murders, and they stretch back to the 1870s,” Dani said.

“My father may have killed more people than we ever thought, but he can’t have killed all of them,” Malcolm quickly responded. “Based on some of the books Francis deemed important enough to have on the bottom shelf, I think he just had a morbid fascination with death.”

“Sounds a little like someone else we know,” JT said with a knowing look. Malcolm smiled and shook his head.

Gil was so proud of how far his team had come since Malcolm joined them. He had been willing to defend Malcolm tooth and nail if JT never took to him, but he would’ve been lying if he said he hadn’t prayed for JT to accept the kid as one of their own. And over time, it happened. JT accepted the kid and protected him and looked after him like he did Dani. His jokes lost their cutting edge, and became a thing of brotherly banter and love. Gil had the best team in the entire NYPD. One day, far off in the future, when he retired, he hoped that JT would be the one to become the new lieutenant, the new leader of the major crimes squad. JT would make a fantastic lieutenant.

“I’ve got something,” JT muttered. Gil and Malcolm moved in closer, while Dani just cocked her head to listen as she continued to sift through newspapers. JT held the local history book out over the desk. “It says construction on the house began in 1869, and it finished a few years later. The Whitly family moved here from Virginia that same year, and bought the plot where they would build,” he said.

“Dani, find what you can from 1869, or at least around then,” Gil told her.

“On it,” she replied.

Gil went back to the yearbook spread on Holly Parker. She had been senior captain for the cheer squad, at the top of her class. By all accounts, she was a remarkable girl who had a bright future ahead of her. The yearbook spread didn’t mention the specifics of the crime the way the newspaper did, but it did have a tip line listed, implying that the crime had gone unsolved. That didn’t surprise any of them. There was a section of quotes about the girl from her friends. One of them was even from Martin. “Such a shame,” it read. “She deserved better.” Of course, Gil knew that Martin was just referring to the way that he had killed her. According to the various newspaper articles they had dug up about the crime, it had seemed to the police that the killer had been interrupted. Gil refrained from mentioning to Malcolm his father’s quote on that page.

“I’ve got something,” Dani called out. She joined them at the desk and laid out several newspapers. They were all dated to the 1860s, and each one spoke a different slave murder, all unsolved. “A string of slave murders went down during the Civil War in Virginia, where Bright’s family lived. Investigations finally began a few years after the war was over, and that was when the Whitlys moved to New York,” she said.

Gil looked over at the kid. “Did your family own a plantation?” he hesitantly asked. It was a difficult question to face.

“According to this,” Malcolm muttered, holding up the family history book. “Yes, they did. The Whitly family fortune began on a plantation. Once they moved to New York, they began making alcohol out of this estate, and kept their wealth high. Due to the remote location, that probably lasted throughout prohibition as well.”

What Gil really wanted to ask, he couldn’t. Everything they found out was more and more suspicious, but there was no way to truly know whether or not Malcolm’s ancestors were all murderers. They were finding more and more circumstantial evidence that pointed to that, but until they had more proof, Gil didn’t want to bring it up. Malcolm didn’t need that on his shoulders. The poor kid already worried every day about turning into his father. The idea that maybe his entire family history was covered in blood could send the kid spiraling. But why would a prominent southern family move to the north after the Civil War unless they were trying to throw suspicion off themselves? His ancestors certainly had something to do with those deaths. That could not be ignored, no matter how much Gil wanted to.

“Kid, I don’t need to tell you that-.”

“That it looks like all my ancestors are killers?” Malcolm interrupted, tossing his hands up.

“We don’t know that,” Gil claimed, despite the building evidence to the contrary.

“Come on, Gil. You’re all detectives. You know exactly what this looks like,” Malcolm said. He was smiling, but it was a broken, manic smile. The family history book was open to a large family portrait, dating to the 1930s. Malcolm pointed at one of the men, a young man about Malcolm’s age. “And this guy,” he continued, his voice nearly breaking. “My great grandfather, Henry Whitly, Francis’ father, is the guy I saw.” He looked at Gil, an anguish in his eyes that went beyond tears, shattering Gil’s heart. The kid was talking about the vision he had after collapsing back on estate property.

“What guy that you saw?” JT hesitantly asked.

Malcolm sighed. “After I got back onto the estate, when I couldn’t breathe, I saw something. It was more like a dream than a hallucination. I saw this man, strangling someone. It wasn’t me, but I could feel him doing it. I didn’t recognize him in the dream, but it was this man. My great grandfather murdered some poor girl.” He looked back up at them. “My father has killed even more people than we thought, my great grandfather was a killer, and even more of my ancestors before that were murderers.” The kid was unraveling in front of him, and there was nothing Gil could do about it. He stepped closer to him, placing his hands on the kid’s slim shoulders, forcing Malcolm to look at him.

“Let’s take a break,” Gil said calmly, though he knew his team would take it as the order it was.

“We can’t, there’s so much-.”

“I don’t care how much there is,” Gil interrupted. He gave the kid’s shoulders a comforting squeeze. “Powell will take you to the kitchen. Find some food. You need it.” Malcolm opened his mouth to object again, but Dani beat him to it.

“Come on,” she said, putting her hand on the kid’s back. “I’m hungry too.” She began to lead him away from the desk and out of the room.

“You better be bringing back me something,” JT called out after them, a smirk on his face. That smirk fell the moment Dani and Malcolm were out of the room. “Dude’s family has got to be cursed, or something.” He shook his head with a low whistle.

Gil scoffed, but nodded. “And that’s not all,” he said. “This local history book is filled with unsolved murders and missing persons. Significantly more than any one area should have. It’s looking more and more like the Whitly family has been killing people for at least the past hundred and fifty years.”

JT glanced around conspiratorially. “What do you think the chances are that there’s some very real skeletons in these closets?” he asked. Gil cringed, but didn’t deny the possibility. With the staggering number of missing persons cases that the area saw throughout the years, it only made sense that the Whitlys had to be hiding the bodies somewhere. The estate was certainly both large enough to hide a plethora of people, and remote enough that no one would think to look there. The Whitly family was well off enough to be able to financially throw suspicion off themselves, and often, that in and of itself was enough to avoid prosecution.

“What are we even looking for, really?” JT asked. “All that thing said is that the kid has to stay here overnight. Can’t we just hunker down by the fire, take a nap, leave in the morning? So far, nothing has happened except when Bright tried to leave.”

Technically, JT was right, but a sudden crash of thunder reminded Gil that just because things seemed like they were under control, didn’t mean that there wasn’t danger lurking around the corner.

“It can’t last,” Gil replied with a shake of his head. “I know you feel it too. _Something_ is going to happen, and when it does, we need to be ready for it. Somehow, knowing about the history of this place, of the Whitly family, it’s going to help.”

JT nodded. “What about Bright’s grandparents? Did he know them at all?”

“If he did, he never mentioned them, and I never asked,” Gil responded. “The Milton grandparents, I knew them. They were standoffish at best, very cold people. They didn’t care much about their grandchildren after Martin was arrested. But Bright never mentioned his dad’s parents. Neither did Jessica. Have you found anything in these books about them?” He gestured towards the book in JT’s hands, the book of local history. “Are they ever mentioned?”

“Not once,” JT replied with a shake of his head. “Not by name, at least. There’s more unsolved murders, but none of them fit a pattern that would connect them all to one person. The Surgeon seemed to be the first Whitly with a distinguishable signature of any kind. Of course, he also operated directly in the city, while everyone else it seems did their thing up here, getting tourists and other people traveling on the backroads.”

Gil couldn’t even begin to imagine what must have been going through Malcolm’s head. The poor kid was worried enough about ending up like his father, and all of that got compounded with Ainsley killing Endicott. Knowing that all of his ancestors seemed to be murderers as well could only make things worse. No matter what else happened that night, Gil was going to have to do some serious damage control when they got out of that estate. They were going to have to keep it all quiet too, not just because no one would believe them if they talked about what was happening there, but because the media would have a field day with finding out the Whitly secrets. Gil couldn’t let that happen to the family again. No matter what the kid’s ancestors did, he and sister were wonderful people, not to mention their mother too. Ainsley only did what she did to protect her family; that wasn’t the same as the horrendous murders that Martin and the other Whitlys had committed. It wouldn’t matter what the courts decided. It was already hard enough for Malcolm now that his sister had killed someone. People talked. Everyone at the precincts and labs who had finally gotten over their initial distrust of Malcolm for being a Whitly had reversed course. Once the news about Ainsley broke out, they all figured it was just a matter of time before Malcolm snapped and did the same. After all, Ainsley had been the normal one. How did a freak like Malcolm even stand a chance? Gil couldn’t let that get compounded by the whole city finding out about the kid’s ancestry.

“I found this, though,” JT said, bringing Gil out of his thoughts.

He glanced over at the detective, who had a large family picture pulled up, with Martin front and center. There wasn’t a date, but it looked to be from the late 1970s. No matter how old Martin was, his psychotic smile always made him easily recognizable. There was a list of names attached to the picture, listing each Whitly family member. Gil could see the resemblance between the Francis in the photograph and the Francis in the portrait on the wall. The older couple in the picture proved to be Malcolm’s grandparents. Their names were Jasper and Elizabeth Whitly. They looked like a happy couple. Nothing about them seemed off or evil in any way, yet they had raised a serial killer. It was highly unusual for a serial killer to grow up with the perfect family life, so Gil knew there was definitely a darkness lurking behind the curtain. An elderly couple was in the picture as well. Their names were listed as Henry and Beatrice Whitly. Upon seeing a picture of a younger Henry, Malcolm had recognized him as the killer in his vision, and here he was in the other family portrait as an old man. Without knowing that, Gil wouldn’t have seen him as anything other than a typical grandpa.

Gil and JT continued to pour over the books and newspapers, but they only continued to build more and more evidence to what they had already suspected: the Whitly family was filled with killers, generation after generation. Gil didn’t know what he was supposed to do with that knowledge. All of those killers were dead, so it wasn’t as if they could be prosecuted, and the vast majority of people who even knew the victims were dead as well, so justice couldn’t even be brought to many of their families if the cases were solved - and besides that, Gil had no intention of every letting anyone find out about the kid’s family’s evil history.

“How could one family be so cruel?” Gil asked no one in particular.

JT nodded and let out a low chuckle. “It seems like Bright is the only good thing to come from that whole damn line.”

A soft sliding sound from behind him stole their attention.

“Hey, boss, are you seein’ this?” JT asked. Slowly, Gil turned around. Dozens of books on the shelves were sliding around, moving this way and that, and hanging in the air, yet none of them falling. Gil blinked a few times, but nothing changed.

“I don’t know what I'm seeing,” Gil replied.

He and JT continued to stare as the books continued to move, until finally, they stopped, all at the same time. Only one book remained out of place. It wasn’t on the bottom shelf, as all of the other useful books had been, but at about average shoulder height. Gil and JT looked at each other for a moment before Gil gave a slight shrug. Slowly, he walked towards it, and went to pull it out. Only, it wouldn’t move. It was stuck halfway off the shelf, and it wouldn’t move out any further. Furrowing his brow, Gil pulled harder, until he heard a click. The bookshelf started to move, making him jerk back.

“What the hell,” JT muttered. The entire left side of the bookshelf moved to the side, revealing a dark tunnel that sloped down. “Of course this dude has a secret passageway in his gothic mansion. How silly of me to not expect that.” He rolled his eyes and shook his head, but Gil still didn’t know what to say. How was someone supposed to respond to that?

“Did you find anything on the house blueprints about this?” Gil asked, for lack of anything else intelligible to say.

“I didn’t even find any blueprints, and if I did, and they had secret passageways on ‘em, that’d be like the first thing I’d mention,” JT pointed out.

Gil shook his head and turned back around. “We’re not going down there until Bright and Powell get back,” he said, but no sooner had he spoken the words than he felt something pulling at his body, forcing him to turn back towards the passageway once more. Gil took a stumbling step towards the corridor, as if there were a chain wrapped around his waist, pulling him that way. His gaze shot up to JT, who met it with a mixture of confusion and fear in his own face. It wasn’t something he saw in JT often. They both stumbled closer to the corridor, all their effort to hold their positions useless. This had to be what Malcolm had been referring to earlier, when he said that he was made to sign the documents, without his control. Knowing what his kid had been subjected to made his blood boil.

“What do we do?” JT asked, his voice hurried, with just the slightest tinge of panic.

“I guess we go down there,” Gil replied, teeth clenched, as he took another stumbling step towards the dark hallway. It didn’t matter how good of a grip he got on the desk, or the bookshelf, the invisible force controlling him was stronger. 

“If I gotta go down a creepy ass dark secret passageway, it’s gonna be on my terms,” JT growled. Out of the corner of his eye, Gil could see the detective pulling his gun and leaning into the pull of the invisible chain. JT passed him, gun drawn, no longer fighting it. Gil shook his head and bit back a curse, but did the same.

If they were being dragged down a dark tunnel towards an unknown fate, they were going to greet that fate with guns at the ready. Still, Gil’s thoughts turned to Malcolm as the hallway got darker and darker. He and JT might not live to see dawn, but he would fight until his last breath to make sure that his kid did.


	4. Chapter 4

Every time that Malcolm thought he couldn’t possibly hate being a Whitly even more, he got proven wrong. It just wasn’t enough that his father had to be a serial killer with an ever increasing body count even after his arrest. No, Malcolm’s entire ancestry had to be wrought with murderers and monsters. How did Malcolm even have a chance of staying on the straight and narrow if every single one of his ancestors hadn’t been able to? And with Ainsley’s trial still awaiting, their fates seemed increasingly dark. The remaining question was, did the family know that each one before them was a killer? Or were they in the dark about their shared misdeeds? If they didn’t know, or never found out, then killing had to be a genetic predisposition. That meant that Malcolm had even less of a chance of combating it.

“Hey, none of this has anything to do with you,” Dani said, her voice low as she ducked her head to catch his gaze. Of course, she knew exactly what he was thinking. Dani put her hand on his shoulder, stopping them off to the side in the front entryway, the portrait of Francis Whitly hanging above them. “You are not your family. You are your own person. It doesn’t matter what they’ve done, it only matters what you do.”

Malcolm sighed, shaking his head. “If everyone in my heritage fell, all of them became killers, then it can only be a matter of time before I do too. Maybe we really are cursed.” His gaze fell again, away from the beautiful woman in front of him. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the portrait on the wall, staring at him, judging him. Somehow, it looked different than it had earlier. Malcolm couldn’t put his finger on what was different, but something certainly was. He could’ve sworn that Francis hadn’t had as sharp of a jawline, or blue eyes. But he must have been wrong.

“It only takes one person to break the cycle. You know that,” Dani affirmed. She ducked her head again, once more forcing Malcolm to look at her. “If anyone can be the one to step out of line and change things, it’s you. I’ve known you long enough to know that you’re not going to just sit back and let others decide your life for you.” She took a breath before continuing, as if she didn’t want to say what she was about to. “The neighborhood in the Bronx where I grew up, people didn’t usually go anywhere good in life. I was much more likely to end up in Esteme’s crew for real, growing up there, than I was to become a cop, especially after my dad died. But I wasn’t going to let statistics define who I was, and neither are you. What they did has nothing to do with you. Bright, you’re so much different than anyone I’ve ever met.” She smiled and looked away for a moment, almost blushing. “And you’re different from your family too. You’re something special.” She smiled again with a small shrug, then put her hand on his shoulder once again for a brief moment before pulling it away. “Now come on, let’s find something to eat.” Dani walked away before Malcolm could give a real response.

“Thanks,” he muttered regardless. Dani flashed him another beautiful smile and waited for Malcolm to catch up to her. Even if Malcolm didn’t share her optimism about his future, he still appreciated her words more than he could ever say. He didn’t even know how to begin. Thankfully, Dani knew him well enough to know that, which he would guess was why she walked away before he even had a chance to say much of anything. That was just another reason why she was a great friend, one of the greatest friends Malcolm had ever had - although, frankly, with having so few friends over the prior twenty years, that wasn’t a very high bar - and he never wanted to mess that up.

Malcolm glanced again at the portrait as they made their way from the front entryway into the small sitting room. Everything about the entire situation was making him paranoid. The portrait couldn’t be staring at him, and it couldn’t be changing. He was just remembering it wrong. It had to have always had blue eyes, that sharper jawline, and been more restored than his initial impression had been. He was just too paranoid to be rational, but then again, that wasn’t too different from how the last twenty years of his life had been, so he couldn’t be too surprised.

From the entryway, into the sitting room, into the dining room, and finally through the double doors into the kitchen, Malcolm and Dani went. The kitchen was massive, looking more like the kitchen found in a restaurant in size than in a private residence. But it wasn’t plain and industrial like a restaurant kitchen. All of the appliances and cookware looked like antiques, like they might set the whole place on fire if Malcolm tried to use them. The walls were painted that same deep crimson like the library and study were, and nothing was covered in grease and food stains like restaurant kitchens were.

“What’ll it be?” Dani asked him from the large, walk in pantry. “Your options are soup, beans, peanut butter, or pancakes.” She turned around and looked at him with a smile. “Either Francis ate almost as often as you do, or the creepy butler got rid of everything but the non-perishables.”

Malcolm opened the fridge, and found it empty. He nodded.

“I’m not a big fan of peanut butter, but if the alternative is to try to use that stove-,” he pointed at the ancient thing, which was definitely a fire or gas leak waiting to happen, “-then I guess peanut butter is the only option.” He wasn’t exactly in the mood to anything anyway, but Malcolm figured he didn’t have a good excuse not to.

“Wait,” Dani called out from the back of the pantry. She emerged a moment later with two granola bars in hand. “These are still good,” she said with a smile, holding them up. She tossed him one before unwrapping her own. “But they were also the only two left, so don’t tell JT about them. He and Gil can share the peanut butter.”

Malcolm chuckled around a mouthful of granola as he imagined Gil eating peanut butter straight out of the tub. Ainsley had done that a lot as they were growing up, and their mother had chastised her every single time. Every now and then, on those rare occasions that Ainsley would join him at the Arroyo’s house, she would eat it straight out of the tub, and both Gil and Jackie would laugh and tell her to save some for them. Then Jackie would scoop some out with her fingers, and Gil would say “at least get a spoon” before he dug into it with a spoon designed for soup. Malcolm would just laugh, not a fan of peanut butter, but just filled with such joy at being with people who he knew loved him more than anything. He sighed. Those were good memories. He glanced around the kitchen. Malcolm doubted there had been any such wonderful memories made there.

“What’s that look for?” Dani gently asked him. She offered him a gentle smile before taking another bite of her granola bar.

Malcolm smiled, then shook his head. “It’s nothing, just memories of being a kid, with Gil,” he said. “With this house of horrors, I doubt many fond memories were made at all.” It was a shame, really. The estate truly was a thing of beauty, a work of art, even. But all of the tragedy and horror surrounding it would cast a shadow that would never truly go away, no matter what good memories could possibly be made there in the future.

He looked around the kitchen, looking for a trash can to put the wrapper of the granola bar in - honestly, he was proud of himself for finishing the whole bar - when the everpresent pressure on his chest tightened for a brief moment, and his vision went dark at the edges. Malcolm gasped, reaching out to the counter to steady himself as he doubled over.

“Bright?” Dani called out, panic in her voice. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see her rushing towards him, but the darkness got to him first.

_“It’ll happen when he’s ready,” Malcolm felt himself saying, only it wasn’t his voice coming out of his mouth, and he definitely wasn’t meaning to say anything at all. He took a step forward, leaning against the kitchen counter. He could see his reflection off the teapot on the stove. Malcolm didn’t look anything like himself. He looked like Henry Whitly, but older. Based on the clothes and hair, Malcolm would guess it was the early 1960s. “Just because I started when I was a teenager doesn’t mean that Jasper is a late bloomer.”_

_The woman across from him - Beatrice Whitly, if Malcolm was correct - sighed and flopped down onto a seat at the kitchen table. “This will all be so much easier once he starts. Why do we even have to hide it, if you’re so confident that he’ll start on his own time anyway?” she asked._

_“Because,” Malcolm - no, Henry - stressed, coming around the table and putting his hands on his wife’s shoulders, beginning to massage them. “The thrill is always the best when you do it completely alone the first time, when you think you can’t tell anyone. Jasper deserves to have that thrill before we let him know that it was inevitable, that we’re all the same,” he said._

_“But how do you know? What if he finds a girl before he starts, and she’s not like us? What will happen then?”_

_“Bea, my darling, you need to relax,” he said with a chuckle. “The right people have ways of finding each other.”_

_Beatrice sighed, but nodded. “As long as you’re sure.”_

_“Of course I’m sure. He’s a Whitly.” Malcolm - Henry - turned away, clapping his hands together once. “Now, where should we take our guest? The basement? The tree? Where should he spend his final moments? He’s certainly waited long enough to know the truth.”_

_A dark chuckle came from the woman behind him. “The tree. Let him see the sunrise. After all, it will be his last one.”_

Malcolm gasped in a new breath of air as Beatrice faded away and his hands once again became his own. He had both hands against the kitchen counter, arms shaking as he held himself up. It had happened again. How was that happening? And how could he make it stop? Malcolm breathed in another full breath as he fought back a sob. He didn’t know exactly what his great grandparents had been talking about, but based on what their final comments had been alluding to, it couldn’t be anything good. They had been about to kill someone.

“Bright?” Dani called out again. Her voice broke, so she had probably been calling his name several times. Finally, Malcolm managed to look over at her with watery eyes. He would’ve been embarrassed, but he could see the unshed tears in her eyes too. “Are you okay? What happened?” she asked.

“I’m good,” Malcolm replied, his voice shaky but strong.

“Do I need to go get Gil?” she asked before he could respond to her second question.

“No.” Malcolm quickly shook his head. He lifted his hands off the counter and forced his arms to stop shaking. The pressure on his chest had returned to the normal level - still annoying, but not panic inducing. Malcolm didn’t think that pressure was going to leave until it was all over. “No, I’m fine,” he insisted, running his hands through his hair. Dani led him over to the kitchen table - the same kitchen table where his great grandparents had so casually discussed murder, if he was right.

“What was that?” she gently asked, her eyes clear once again. “That looked just like what happened outside, after you, uh, ya know…” she trailed off, looking away from him for a moment before meeting his gaze again.

Malcolm fidgeted with a string on his dress shirt that had come loose. With the way he was pulling at it, he knew he would probably have to get it mended to keep the string from unraveling the stitching along the cuff. Then again, it was only a plain white dress shirt. He had plenty of those. He probably wouldn’t take the time to get it mended after all, even if it did end up needing it. Malcolm could certainly afford to lose one shirt. The rain was still beating down on them too. He could hear it against the roof, the thunder echoing through the massive estate. It had been a long time since the storm had started back in the city, but it didn’t seem to be stopping any time soon.

“Bright,” Dani gently called out, resting her hand on his arm to stop his fidgeting. “You need to talk to me. Tell me what’s going on,” she said. Malcolm sighed. She was right. He didn’t truly understand what was going on himself, but he supposed it was best to just tell her what he saw. If something happened to her because Malcolm hadn’t been fully honest - well, fully honest about the visions, at least - he would never forgive himself.

“It was,” he muttered, giving a slight nod.

“It was what?”

“It was just like what happened outside,” he continued, his voice only slightly stronger. “I saw something, just like I did then.” He paused for a moment, unsure how to continue, but Dani only looked at him with patience and kindness, and he knew that no matter what he said, it was going to be okay. He started again, stronger. “I saw my great grandparents, right here. They were talking about Jasper, my grandfather. I don’t know for sure, but I think they were talking about him killing people. Then they started about their guest, and how the next sunrise would be his last. I think they were going to kill him.” Malcolm averted his gaze, staring at his shaking hands loosely clasped together between his knees. His father had been right. Dr. Whitly hadn’t been lying about any of it, it seemed. But that was the problem when the man cried wolf. When something was real, Malcolm never knew until it was too late.

After another moment, Dani finally responded. “We’re gonna figure this out,” she said, resting her hand on his knee for a brief moment before moving to take his shaking hands in hers. “I’m gonna help you figure this out, and we’re gonna get out of here. The sun will rise, and we’ll leave, and everything will be okay.” She smiled at him, her face a little closer to his than it normally was. Malcolm blushed and looked away. She was so unbearably beautiful.

“Let’s hope so,” Malcolm replied, forcing a smile of his own. Dani finally stood up, but kept her hands in his.

“We should bring that peanut butter back to JT before he gets too grumpy,” she said. She pulled Malcolm up and out of the chair before she let go of him and grabbed the tub of peanut butter off the counter. They hadn’t taken two steps before Malcolm heard it: a light, airy sound coming from another room. The sound felt cold, like a sudden draft creeping into a bedroom during the night. Where was it coming from? Upstairs? He stopped where he was, ears honing in on that sound.

He waited a beat, then there it was again, that chiming sound. It left his skin crawling, as if spiders were creeping underneath his clothes. Was it laughter? Was there someone else in the house? Malcolm moved away from Dani, towards the back of the kitchen, where there was a much less ornate, very thin set of stairs. They weren’t wide enough for more than one person to use them at a time. Malcolm heard it one more time. It sent chills like cold water down his spine and caused his hand to shake once again, but Malcolm couldn’t ignore it. Something about it was drawing him in, even though he knew it wasn’t a good idea.

“Bright?” he heard Dani call out behind him as he stared up the stairs. “Bright, what are you doing?”

“There’s something up there,” he muttered, just loud enough for her to hear him. Malcolm took another creeping step towards the stairs.

“Shouldn’t we wait for Gil and JT?” she asked, but Malcolm could hear her setting the tub of peanut butter down on the counter and come closer to him. Dani was most certainly right, but for some reason, Malcolm didn’t care. The fear that should have been holding him back, was instead spurning him forward. There was something else in that house with them, in _his_ house, and Malcolm was going to figure out what it was. He didn’t need Dani or JT or even Gil to help him. He didn’t need anyone. Whitlys didn’t need anyone but themselves.

Malcolm stopped, his head bolting up. What was he thinking? Where had that come from? Of course he needed his team. Still, his curiosity wouldn’t allow him to wait.

“I’ve got you with me,” he finally responded, flashing her a smile that he didn’t quite feel. She rolled her eyes, but grinned nonetheless.

“If we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do it the right way,” Dani said. “I’m going first.” She gently pushed past him, her hand going to her gun. As much as Malcolm missed his own service weapon, he did love watching Dani with hers, and she was quite adept with it. He had heard plenty of stories about Dani and JT trying to one-up each other at the shooting range time and time again. It was no secret in the major crimes division that while JT reigned supreme on rifles, Dani had nearly everyone in the entire precinct beat on handgun accuracy. The logical part of Malcolm’s brain knew that that was completely logical, that JT being better with rifles and Dani with handguns matched right up with statistics when it came to trained men and women, but the other part of his mind just saw a beautiful woman with a gun who could kick his ass and nothing else mattered. But, as he always did, Malcolm pushed those thoughts aside, and allowed Dani to lead the way up the thin staircase, gun at the ready.

Each step creaked and groaned, definitely taking away any element of surprise that they could have had, if there really was someone up there. Still, Dani kept her gun at the ready and cleared the hallway the moment she reached the top of the stairs.

“There’s no one there,” she said with a shake of her head. Dani slipped her weapon back into her holster as she looked back at Malcolm. She moved out into the hallway to give him room to join her.

“Do you still hear it?” he asked her. Dani looked at him quizzically.

“Hear what?”

Malcolm turned quickly to look back at her, hoping to find her fighting a smile that would prove she was messing with him, but her eyes held nothing but the truth. She hadn’t heard it. Had Malcolm even heard it? It was true, some of the oddities he’d experienced at the estate had been things that his team had assured him they’d seen too, but what if most of it was in his own mind after all? The strange things they were experiencing could merely be exacerbating his already fracturing mind, driving him even more quickly towards a full psychotic break, just like Dr. Le Deux was always worried about when it came to Malcolm.

“Hey,” Dani gently called out, drawing his attention back to him. “If you heard something, then I believe you. I can’t pretend to know what’s going on here at all. We’ve already seen impossible things, so if you say you’re hearing something that I can’t hear, then I’m still going to believe you.” She smiled at him, hand still resting on her gun, ready to pull it out at a moment’s notice. “What did you hear?”

Malcolm nodded a few times, looking away from her. He didn’t deserve his team. How could they put so much faith in him when he had so little faith in himself? It didn’t make any logical sense, and yet, they trusted him anyway. Malcolm had sought that kind of fidelity for twenty years, finding it only in Gil one hundred percent of the time - even his mother and Ainsley would occasionally throw him under the bus. He had put every effort into making his team like him and trust him, and now that he finally had that, Malcolm didn’t know how to react. In the back of his mind, a little voice that sounded suspiciously like his father still told him every day that it couldn’t last, that he was going to mess it up just like he messed everything up. Choosing not to listen to that voice was a daily decision, and some days were easier - or harder - than others.

“I’m not sure,” he finally responded after pushing down the lump in his throat. “It sounded like laughter, but it couldn’t be, if there’s no one else here.” Of course, Malcolm was assuming that the sound had some physical origin, versus a supernatural one. Truly, they couldn’t rule anything out, not with how unexplained that pressure on his chest was, or the visions he saw, or the fact that it seemed like he really would die if he tried to leave the estate, not to mention whatever phantom had forced him to sign the contracts, and consistently seeing things that couldn’t be hallucinations but couldn’t be there either.

“If there’s something physically here, we’ll find it,” Dani assured him. Hand still on her gun, ready to pull it back out at any moment, she led the way down the hall. The stairs from the kitchen were at the back corner of the house, with the hallway stretching down the entire length of the house. The elaborate, twisting stairwell in the front entryway was at the other end. Each door on either side of the hallway was closed, and the carpet’s lined design running parallel to the hallway created the illusion of the hallway stretching further and further down. The wallpaper bisecting the walls - painted plum on the top half and burnt orange on the bottom - served to enhance the effect. Malcolm reminded himself that it was just an illusion, nothing was actually stretching like in the Haunted Mansion at Disney World. Antique lights lined the walls, the oblong bulbs providing a soft light that only barely illuminated the hallway. They were all on, but Malcolm couldn’t see a switch anywhere to turn them off. Around each door was an ornate wooden border, carved just as meticulously as the table legs of the dining room table and the bannister of the twisting stairwell.

“So, what, we just go door to door?” Malcolm asked. That seemed highly ineffective and inefficient, but he knew Dani wouldn’t let him check any room by himself, so that was probably the most likely plan.

“Unless you’d rather go back downstairs and watch JT try to look tough while scooping peanut butter out of the jar with his fingers,” she suggested, but began walking down the hallway towards the first door. Dani twisted the knob and opened it quickly, letting it swing wide enough to hit whatever could be standing behind it. It was a habit that Malcolm had never picked up, but should have - that very habit could’ve saved him from being stuck with a cattle prod and knocked out by a serial killer on his last case with the FBI.

The room was empty. It had probably been a bedroom at some point, but it wasn’t in use. The few pieces of furniture that were there were covered in dust, and the rest of the room was bare. Malcolm checked the closet - earning himself a glare from Dani for not letting her, the armed one, check - and found it empty as well.

They repeated the process on two more bedrooms and a bathroom, each one lacking anything of interest. Aside from the dust and general creepiness, nothing was out of the ordinary at all.

“Maybe I didn’t hear anything,” Malcolm muttered. They weren’t coming up with anything, so maybe there was nothing to come up with.

“No, I really think you did,” Dani said softly, almost in a whisper. But there was an odd curiosity in her voice that made Malcolm stop studying his shoes and look at her. Dani’s face was scrunched up, brows furrowed as she stared straight down the hallway. Malcolm turned to follow her gaze, his own eyes going wide at the figure at the end of the hallway.

The first thing he saw was the candlestick, seemingly floating in the air. It was only a moment later that he could make out the transparent form holding it. There was a woman, wearing a long dress and a tilt hat characteristic of the 1930s. She was too far away to make out any other details. Behind her - through her - was the other end of the hallway.

“Please tell me you can see that too,” Malcolm said in a low voice, unwilling to take his eyes off the woman. She wasn’t moving, just looking back and forth at either side of the hallway, as if she were waiting for one of the doors to open.

“Is that candlestick floating?” she asked in lieu of a response.

“But the woman-.”

_“Patricia? Margaret?”_ a feminine voice called out from down the hallway - from the woman - halting Malcolm’s words. She sounded worried.

“What woman?” Dani asked.

A cold breath on the back of his neck had Malcolm hunching his shoulders as he spun around with a cry of surprise, but there was nothing there.

“Bright?” Dani called out, finally taking her eyes off the woman at the other end of the hall. The pressure on Malcolm’s chest was tighter, but not so tight that he was about to pass out again.

“I felt something,” Malcolm said. He looked over his shoulder at the other end of the hallway, but the woman was gone, and the candlestick she had been holding was now sitting on the small table at the end of the hallway. It wasn’t lit as it had been before.

“What just happened?” she asked him, but Malcolm shook his head. Had she not seen the woman?

“I don’t know,” he said honestly. There was so much going on, and he didn’t know how to explain any of it. And he couldn’t even begin to guess what he had felt on his neck. It hadn’t been a cold draft, since right on his neck was the only place he’d felt it, and Dani hadn’t seemed to. It was as if someone had been breathing on him, with dead breath.

Malcolm shuddered before he even registered that he heard it: that airy, musical lilt that felt like being doused with freezing water while bugs crawled over your hands. But it was much more clear this time, and louder. Malcolm could tell exactly what it was. It was the laughter of a young girl, and it was coming from down the hall. He started to move towards it.

“Do you hear it?” he asked Dani, not even bothering to look back at her.

“Bright, wait,” she said. That answered the question well enough. She couldn’t hear it, and she didn’t seem to have seen the apparition either, but she had seen the candlestick. Why was Malcolm the only one who could hear the laughter? Why couldn’t anyone else see what he saw? He jogged towards roughly where he thought the laughter had been coming from.

“I’m not crazy,” he muttered under his breath, even though in the back of his mind, he knew that sounded crazy in and of itself. Malcolm opened the door and stepped inside, leaving it wide open for Dani. But the door seemed to have other ideas. It slammed shut with a bang as loud as the thunder that still crashed outside, separating Malcolm from Dani. He quickly turned and tried to open it, but it was locked. He slammed his shoulder against it, but that did nothing. Even a kick that had worked on all the doors during his time in the FBI did nothing. Malcolm couldn’t get the door to open. “Dani!” he shouted, banging on the door again.

“Bright!” she shouted back to him. He could hear her banging on the door, could feel the vibrations through the wood, but it held firm. The door would not be opened, from either side. “Are you okay?” she asked him.

Malcolm took a quick glance at himself and around the room. “I’m fine,” he affirmed. He hadn’t been hurt in any way. “You?”

“Yeah, I- I think so,” she stuttered, suddening sounding very much not like herself. There was a hint of fear in her voice, and she sounded a few feet further away.

“What’s going on? What’s happening?” he asked. Malcolm banged against the door a few more times, trying once again to break it down and get to her, but to no avail.

“Bright, I can’t- I can’t move!” she cried out in fear, but her voice was moving further away. “This isn’t me, I can’t stop,” she said. Malcolm knew exactly what she meant, and he hated it. Dani was experiencing exactly the same thing that he had. Her body was moving without her control, and this time, that force was taking her away from him. Malcolm rammed his shoulder against the door again, and again, and again, but it held firm.

“Dani!” he cried out. He could hear her shout his name from further down the hall, and he wanted nothing more than to run to her and stop her fear, but he couldn’t. This invisible force wouldn’t let him. “I’ll find you!” he shouted, just hoping that she could hear him. If something happened to her, he would never forgive himself. Malcolm rammed himself against the door a few more times, then kicked it again for good measure, but nothing worked. He was just as trapped inside that room as Dani was by the invisible force. “Damnit,” he muttered, hitting the door once more, this time out of anger rather than an actual thought that it would work to get the door open. After a moment, Malcolm finally turned around, groaning as he did so.

Twin smiles greeted him.

Malcolm jerked back against the door with a sharp intake of breath, his hand automatically going towards the doorknob, which stubbornly refused to turn. Heart hammering in his chest, beating so hard against the pressure that Malcolm felt like his chest might explode, he stared down the girls. They were young, pre-teen for sure, both wearing floral print dresses with rounded white collars - characteristic of the 1930s. The older girl was holding onto the younger girl’s hand, and the younger girl was holding a baby doll. Just like the woman from the hallway, Malcolm could see right through them.

They kept smiling at him, but they were real smiles, not the creepy ones he would’ve expected. They looked genuinely happy, despite the puffiness and discoloration of their faces.

“Patricia and Margaret?” he guessed. Those were the girls the woman in the hallway had been calling for.

_“Wanna play?”_ the younger girl asked him, holding up her doll. It was as disfigured as the girls were, but that looked to be more from age and lack of care than the girls, who looked dead - they were dead, if they were ghosts.

_“Maggie loves to play,”_ the older girl said, making her Patricia. Maggie giggled, pulling her doll close to her chest. That airy lilt sent shivers down his spine once again, but this time, that was all. As terrified as he was, Malcolm didn’t let it affect him more than that. The source was right in front of him, and Malcolm knew that he didn’t need to be afraid of them, no matter how much the primal instincts in him said that he was in danger.

“What happened to my friend?” he asked the girls, his voice shaking just a little bit. Malcolm still hadn’t moved from the door.

Patricia shrugged. _“Maybe Mr. Whitly will play with them down by the moat. He and his wife said we needed to learn to swim,”_ she said.

Malcolm felt sick as he realized what the girl was implying, whether she knew it or not. Their faces were discolored in the way that all drowning victim’s faces were discolored. They’d died in that moat. A lump grew in his throat as he looked at the poor, dead, little girls.

“Did no one tell you monsters live here?” he asked them, his voice breaking at the end. How could someone be so cruel? How could his ancestors have been so evil?

_“Mommy said that monsters aren’t real,”_ little Maggie giggled.

She continued to laugh, but Malcolm’s attention was stolen by the pressure on his chest increasing again. Malcolm whimpered as he clutched uselessly at the wall. Why did this keep happening? How could he make it stop? His vision darkened again, the sounds of the girls’ laughter echoing as the darkness claimed him once again.

_His shadow hung over the woman’s face, obscuring her from view, but he knew her eyes bulged as he put more pressure on her neck, forcing those eyes open. Her long nails scratched at him, but they couldn’t leave a mark. She was going to die, and she knew it._

_Malcolm panicked. He tried with all of his might to release his hands - not his hands, definitely not his own hands - to let her go, but they were stuck around her thin throat, unforgiving and murderous. He tried to tell the woman he was sorry, that he was doing everything he could but he couldn’t stop, but a haunting laugh came out instead._

_“You shouldn’t have tried to run. No one leaves the Whitly Estate,” he heard a voice say. He could feel his mouth moving, but that wasn’t his voice that left it. Slowly, the woman on the ground stopped struggling. He kept his hands where they were, squeezing tight long after the woman lay limp on the ground. Again, Malcolm tried to force himself to move, to give her mouth to mouth, to just do something, but to no avail. He continued to squeeze, even as the woman’s face changed from that of a stranger to a friend. Malcolm blinked and he was staring down at Dani, lying dead on the ground. He blinked again, and the hands were his own. He was strangling Dani. Malcolm tried to cry out, to beg and scream for whatever this was to stop, to just end, but he heard his own dark chuckle instead._

_“You should’ve left when you had the chance,” he heard himself say. Even in Malcolm’s terror, he felt a euphoria rush through him at the murder, unlike anything he’d ever felt. He wanted to cry, knowing this other him would do anything to feel it again._

Air came rushing back to Malcolm through a gasping wheeze as the darkness receded, leaving him back in that room, with only the light from the flashes of lightning streaming through the window to illuminate it. Malcolm took in several gasping breaths as he glanced around the room. The girls were gone, but the doll was still there, sitting on the floor by the old crib, where it had likely been left for the last few decades. He closed his eyes, trying to force himself to calm down. It was fine. Everything was going to be fine. Malcolm repeated it to himself over and over again to stave off the anxiety attack that he couldn’t handle. That’s what Gil would tell him. Damn, he needed Gil. He needed to find him. He needed to get out of that room and find his team. With a final deep breath, Malcolm opened his eyes-

-and found another set staring at him. He cried out in surprise as he grappled for the stiff doorknob once again. But unlike with the girls, the figure in front of him filled Malcolm with pure terror, more than any nightmare ever could, more than even his father ever did. He stared up at the transparent man, eyes wide, body frozen. Malcolm couldn’t move, and this time, he knew that was entirely psychological. He was frozen with fear.

The man in front of him was the same man he’d seen time and time again: Henry Whitly, his great-grandfather. He wore the same psychotic smile that Malcolm’s father did, and it was just as chilling.

_“You’ve resisted, but I know you’re going to be the greatest of us all,”_ Henry said. His clothes were covered in blood. _“You just have to accept it, and learn.”_

“Learn what?” Malcolm managed to ask, his voice small and scared. He didn’t move, he stayed backed into that corner by the door, his hand shaking as it clutched the knob.

Henry’s face lost its psychotic smile, turning dark and full of rage. _“Learn what happens when you run from your family, from who you are, when you don’t do what you’re told, boy.”_ His voice was growing louder as he leaned closer to Malcolm. Before Malcolm could react, Henry shot his hand out and wrapped it around Malcolm’s throat, lifting him off the ground. He thrashed and struggled against the ghost, but his kicks just went right through the figure. The same occurred when he tried to grapple against the hands around his throat. Malcolm was off the ground, he could feel that pressure and his airway was being restricted, but he was powerless to stop any of it. Henry leaned in closer, his dead face mere inches from Malcolm’s own. _“You were supposed to stay here alone, and now they’re all going to die. It’s all because of you. One way or another, you are going to kill them.”_ Darkness encroached on the edges of Malcolm’s vision as he continued to thrash against the spirit of his great-grandfather. _“It’s supposed to be you, not your sister. It should be you. It still will be you.”_ The force around his throat got impossibly tighter, and the darkness around his vision got wider. A dark chuckle echoed in his ears as Malcolm stopped struggling, his energy spent. The darkness covered everything, but just as Malcolm let it wash over him, the hand was gone.

Malcolm fell back onto unsteady legs, reaching out for the wall to steady himself as he sucked in great lungfuls of air. He was breathing again. His great-grandfather’s laughter echoed around him again, spurring him into action. Malcolm reached blindly for the doorknob once more, his heart soaring when it opened with ease. He dashed out of the room, the floorboards underneath the carpet creaking as Malcolm raced down the hallway, but he didn’t pay them any mind like he had before. As he reached the far end, Malcolm dared a glance behind him, and sighed in relief upon realizing that the spectre was still gone. But that didn’t mean he was out of the woods. He still needed to find his team before it was too late. He was supposed to do this alone, but he hadn’t listened, and now he was being punished. Gil and Dani and JT were being punished.

Malcolm took a deep breath as he turned around and looked down the never-ending hallway. But what was that at the far side? He squinted as he tried to focus on the form on the other end. Was Henry back? Or was it the woman? Malcolm heard a dark chuckle come from all around him, distracting him from the barely visible ghost. He stood straight back up and tried to look around, but he was alone.

The sudden feeling of ice at his back had Malcolm turning around again, coming face to face with the very thing that had sent him running in the first place. Malcolm screamed, despite the ache in his throat from being strangled. Henry laughed again, but this time, blood poured out of his mouth as he opened it. Why couldn’t he wake up? Why couldn’t it all be just another night terror that wasn’t actually real?

_“What’s wrong, boy? You don’t want to spend time with your great-grandad?”_ Henry laughed again before his face turned dark once more. _“You better run.”_

And that was exactly what Malcolm did. He raced back down the hallway, past the fading apparition of the woman with strangulation marks around her neck as she searched for her dead children, down the spiral staircase, past the portrait gallery in the front entryway and the still changing painting of Francis, and into the library.

“Gil!” he shouted, only, the library was empty. Gil and JT were both gone, and there was no sign of Dani either. He ran up to the desk, hoping to find something that would give him a hint as to what happened, but nothing seemed amiss. There were newspapers and books spread out over the desk, ready to be gone over. Malcolm spared them all a glance, but he didn’t see anything that told him something he didn’t already know. What he really needed was a diary, something that would tell him what had happened there once and for all.

Francis had been meticulous. He would’ve kept some sort of journal. Malcolm needed to find the master bedroom, he needed that journal. That was the only way he could find out what happened to his team, and hopefully, save them in time.

Malcolm turned from the library and went back to the front entryway. The portrait of Francis still stuck out to him more than the others, no matter how beautiful or creepy the others were. Francis was front and center, the most prominent piece as the owner of the estate. But Francis looked younger than Malcolm remembered the portrait looking. His blue eyes looking hauntingly familiar, from a memory just out of reach. The stubble on the man’s jaw reminded Malcolm of his own, but they were related, so that was to be expected. Malcolm shook his head. It didn’t matter, he had more important things to worry about.

He faltered when he reached the bottom of the stairs, remembering what he was running from in the first place. Malcolm’s hand found its way to his throat, gently caressing where he knew angry bruises should be forming. He couldn’t take that again. Still, he had to find the master bedroom, so he had to go back upstairs. He really should have made Caswell take him on a tour of the house. Where even was Caswell? Malcolm hadn’t seen him since the man left the library.

Taking a deep breath and reminding himself what he was doing it for, Malcolm cautiously walked up the stairs, his neck craning to see down the hallway the moment it came into view. He didn’t see anything, neither the woman looking for her daughters, nor Henry. Malcolm breathed a sigh of relief, but didn’t allow himself to relax too much. He had no way of knowing what lay beyond the doors. He and Dani hadn’t checked all of them, the master bedroom being one of them. It was at the end of the hallway, closest to the twisting stairs.

His hand shaking, Malcolm gently opened the door and took a few hesitant steps inside. In any other circumstance, he would’ve been in awe at the grandeur of the room. It was beautiful, with crown moldings and carved metal bed posts. A massive bay window looked out over the sprawling acres of the property. The rain continued to beat down onto the estate, and lightning flashed overhead, illuminating the otherwise dark landscape. Malcolm could see the graveyard. A large tree stood next to it, its branches hovering over it like arms. He stopped, staring at it for a moment. His ancestors were buried there, and maybe, some of their victims were too. But Malcolm knew where he needed to be looking. There was a desk across from the large bed, just as ornate as all the other desks in the estate. What Malcolm was looking for had to be in the bottom drawer, if the pattern persisted.

It did. In the bottom drawer lay a leatherbound journal. Malcolm pulled it out and sat down at the desk chair. The knot in the leather cord tie came undone with ease, giving Malcolm full access to the journal. Right across the top, the name Francis Whitly was written. Malcolm slipped his finger under the first page, but hesitated. He didn’t know what he was about to find out. Once he read it, it was there forever. Whatever he found out, he couldn’t put back. There was no going back.

But it didn’t matter. No matter what it was, Malcolm would face it. If he wanted to save his team, then had to. Hand still shaking, he turned the page, and began pouring over the information held inside his great uncle’s journal.

As meticulous as the man was, many of the pages were boring, filled with more useless information that Malcolm didn’t need. But that didn’t last. A particular page from the 1960s caught his attention.

_“They were wrong. They thought it would be Jasper, but it was me. Mom and Dad were waiting for him to be the one, but it was me. I killed her, and they were happy. They showed me the grave, they told me about their own kills. They were surprised, since it was supposed to be Jasper, but they’re happy nonetheless. It means I’ll be getting the estate instead of him. The inheritance will run through me, instead of him. He won’t be happy about that, but I think he’s proven that he won’t do anything to stop it. He knows. He has to know. But he’s quiet about it. Jasper doesn’t say he knows, but there’s no way he doesn’t. But he doesn’t say anything. I don’t think he ever will. After all, he’s still a Whitly.”_

Malcolm leaned back in his seat, running his fingers through his hair. His father had been telling the truth. Francis really was a killer. And that must have been what his earlier vision was about. Henry and Beatrice were expecting Jasper to become a monster, like them, but it was Francis instead. Had it always been transferred through the eldest son, or something like that? Was that why they were so certain that Malcolm would join them? He had no way of knowing. Malcolm kept reading, flipping through the pages until he found an entry from just a few years before he was born.

_“Jasper and Elizabeth are dead. I know it. Martin killed them. He says they moved to the land of our ancestors, the English countryside, but he’s lying. That kid is insane. We’re all Whitlys, we’re all a little mad, but Martin? He’s something else. He goes to kill in the city, each murder more extravagent than the last. He’s going to get caught that way. We haven’t survived all these years by having a flair for the dramatic. I’m not letting him come back here. The estate is mine, and he’s never coming back. I can’t have him casting suspicion on me, nephew or not. He can find his own dumping ground, find someone else to help him take care of the bodies. Besides, he killed my brother and his wife. They may not have been like us the way they should’ve been, but he was my brother and I loved him anyway. He kept the family secret, even if he did try to keep Martin away. None of that mattered. With what we have, it doesn’t matter who you grow up around. Our nature cannot be contained. Martin was always going to become what he is. Maybe, as long as he doesn’t get himself caught, he’ll be the greatest of us all.”_

By the time Malcolm finished reading the entry, his hand was shaking. He knew his father had certainly been implying that he had intimate knowledge into the deaths of Malcolm’s grandparents, but having the confirmation, actually reading it in his own great uncle’s words, made him sick. Malcolm could feel his stomach churning as he realized even more things that his father had done. How could someone murder their own parents? It was true, there were days when Malcolm wished he’d actually struck his father’s heart with that ice pick, but at least his own father was a serial killer with at least twenty-three - now twenty-six, with Holly Parker and Malcolm’s grandparents - kills under his belt. But even then, he didn’t want to kill his father. No matter what Malcolm suffered at the hands of his father, he still couldn’t wish for the man to die. Deep down, Malcolm knew it was because his relationship with his father was so deeply unhealthy for him that he couldn’t ever hate the man the way he should have. It was twisted and messed up and it made Malcolm sick on a daily basis, but try as he might, he couldn’t escape it. On a psychological level, he understood why. It was his job to understand why, but that didn’t make it any easier on a personal level.

Malcolm tried to pull in a deep breath. He needed to calm down, he needed to keep reading through the journal, to find something to help him figure out what happened to his team. If something happened to them, Malcolm didn’t know what he would do.

He kept flipping through the pages, trying to keep the meager contents of his stomach where they belonged, but nothing else seemed particularly useful. Despite what other people thought, graphic descriptions of murder weren’t something he enjoyed reading, especially when those descriptions would do nothing to help him find his team. They had to be somewhere on the property, hidden, out of sight. Malcolm hadn’t been told about a basement or anything like that, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one.

The first time Malcolm caught a glimpse of his own name in the journal, it was like his breath was stolen from his lungs. The entry was dated just a few days after Malcolm was born. It was simple, straight to the point.

_Martin’s son was born, Malcolm Whitly. He could be greater than Martin, greater than all of us. I will be watching him with great interest._

His hand continued to shake as he stared down at the pages. Francis had been watching him his entire life. He didn’t know how he did it, but that had to be how the dead man seemed to know him so well. When Dr. Whitly was arrested, Francis wasn’t surprised.

_It’s his own fault, operating as brazenly as he did. At least he knows better than to mention us. If he does, he’ll be next. Perhaps I should take his boy to the estate, get him away from his mother. She doesn’t know who we are, or who Martin really was. She won’t encourage Malcolm’s instincts. I could take him away from her, and they would never find him. He would be mine to mold and form. But, perhaps, it would be better to see if his instincts will prevail over her protests. What he is meant to be cannot long remain hidden, whether or not he is raised by someone who will encourage him. Only time will tell._

Francis had been toying with the idea of kidnapping Malcolm, of taking him away from his mother and Ainsley and trying to turn him into a murderer. How could there be so much that Malcolm didn’t even know? Just that morning, he hadn’t even known that Francis existed, and now, he was reading about how the man wanted to kidnap him. Malcolm took another deep breath - well, as deep as he could with that pressure preventing him from fully expanding his chest - and kept turning the pages. He tried not to let the following pages detailing his adolescence - including statements about how he could’ve just killed the bullies that tormented him - graduation from Harvard, and career with the FBI and NYPD, turn his stomach too much. Francis thought it was smart to “work with the hunters”, as he put it. Malcolm had to put the journal down for a moment, just to breathe and keep himself from getting sick.

The final entry, dated just a few days prior, caught Malcolm’s attention.

_My time is coming, I can feel it. After being here so many years, the ghosts have found the truth, and I will not be able to stop them. It’s time for Malcolm to embrace who he is. Ainsley has done more than I ever thought she would, but she is not the one who can learn to control the estate. It will be Malcolm. He must accept his destiny, and learn to control the estate as I have. One day, it will no longer be enough, but if he can survive the night, he will survive it for the next fifty years, until the ghosts find the truth once again and he becomes powerless to fight them, as I have. He will have to pass it on as well, or leave the estate to rot and ruin. He’s a smart boy, so I can only assume that he will find this. Malcolm, stop fighting the truth of who you are. The sooner you accept it, the sooner you can control the mansion. You will have to learn this for yourself, but remember, outliers exist, even within your profiles. A pattern is only accurate until it is not. Don’t let your pride in a profile dictate your every action. The ghosts don’t care. If you want to survive, neither will you._

The few remaining pages in the journal were empty. His hand shaking still, Malcolm set the journal back down on the desk. What did that even mean? He leaned back in the chair as he pondered it. Was that telling him he was looking in the wrong place? Malcolm was assuming that it would all fit the pattern of the most important things being close to the ground, but maybe that was telling him that that wasn’t always the case. Maybe he needed to be looking for an attic.

Malcolm shot up, a flash of lightning accentuating his movements. There was usually a hatch to the attic in old hallways. Heart racing in apprehension, Malcolm moved back into the hallway, cautiously looking up and down it. There were no ghosts, but in the dim light, he could make out a well hidden door in the ceiling. But how was he supposed to get to it? There was no hanging cord he could pull, and he was much too short to reach it on his own. He didn’t even think JT would be able to reach it on his own. But there was a metal latch. He just had to somehow reach it and pull it down. Malcolm glanced up and down the hallway. The ghosts were still gone, but there wasn’t anything he could use to stand on either, and he didn’t exactly have the time to look around for something.

Shaking his head at what he was about to attempt, Malcolm took a few steps back, knowing he would need to build up momentum. He held up a hand, measuring the distance. He could make it work. JT would be rolling his eyes so hard if he saw what Malcolm was about to attempt. With two leaping bound steps, Malcolm jumped up off one foot, then jumped off the doorknob with the other, reaching up to grasp the metal handle. The moment the hatch started to swing down, Malcolm let go with one hand to grab onto the ledge. Carefully, quickly, he let go of the latch completely, hanging on to the ledge. With a grunt, Malcolm lifted himself up like he was doing chin-ups, and pulled himself up and into the attic.

He lay on the floor, staring up into the darkness around him, breathing as hard as the phantom pressure on his chest would allow. The beating of the rain against the roof was significantly louder, as was the screaming of the wind and the crashing of thunder, but no light could permeate the darkness. Malcolm couldn’t even see his own hand in front of him. Still lying on his back, Malcolm fished his phone out of his pocket. He still didn’t have any signal, but the flashlight worked just fine. With a groan, he forced himself to sit up, and turned the flashlight on.

A decomposing body lay only two feet away from him.

Malcolm took in a gasping breath of air as he scrambled back and away. Calling it a body was a little generous. It was a skeleton, clearly having been dead for quite a long time. The bones looked old, ancient even. That was all Malcolm could tell. Taking a deep breath, he looked away from it, and swung the flashlight around the rest of the attic.

It was large, clearly stretching across the length of the mansion. From what Malcolm could tell, it was filled with old furniture and other odds and ends - everything you would normally expect to find in an attic. But there had to be something, somewhere, that would help him.

The beam of the flashlight caught on a mirror standing atop a dresser, reflecting back to the other side of the attic. Malcolm walked towards the mirror, but nothing seemed amiss. There were clear red marks on his neck in the shape of hands - of his dead great-grandfather’s hands - proving that he really had been attacked. He gently ran his fingers over them, not hard enough to cause any pain. Those bruises would be difficult to cover up once this was all over. Malcolm would either have to stay inside for over a week or come up with a damn good story.

He turned back to the attic, sweeping his phone around once again, thankful for its long lasting battery, despite the lack of signal. The skeleton caught his eye once more. It wasn’t just haphazardly tossed there on the floor, it was lying there as if spread out for archaeological research. Either whoever it was had been left in that position to rot for so many years, or the bones had been placed in that way for a reason. The position implied care, but also study and research. Since it seemed to be the only body up there - the only visible one, at least - Malcolm assumed the body hadn’t just been dumped there. Francis had mentioned a dumpsite on the property, likely a mass grave of some sort. That meant that the body was positioned there for a reason. Malcolm crept closer to it. What was the reason?

Malcolm crouched down next to the bones as he examined them. It looked like there was something written on the ribs, carved into them. The lines were neat, precise. At least they were carved post-mortem.

_A white meadow stained red can never become pure again. All we can do is add to the color, red, red, red. This we must do, there is no end. A wrong choice in times long ago, an immutable desire, a flame that cannot be quenched. There is no justice for the family cursed by things unseen. Only rebellion against this new nature, which few have tried and none have prevailed, would set us free._

Malcolm leaned back on his heels. How was that supposed to help? Why couldn’t the answers just all be clearly spelled out? That would certainly make it all a lot easier.

Sitting back, Malcolm pondered the words, all carved out on the ribcage of the poor victim. Red had to be blood. With his family’s history, that was the only thing that made sense. The white meadow could be his family, since that’s where the name from in Old English. Was it saying that his family was literally cursed? Malcolm certainly couldn’t rule that out, considering everything he’d seen that day. If his family was cursed to kill, then “rebellion against this new nature” could simply be refusing to kill. But Malcolm had never killed anyone, and from what he could tell, all of his ancestors had already started killing by the time they were his age. So what could it mean? How was Malcolm supposed to figure it out? He couldn’t pretend that he actually knew what was going on. He just wanted to find his team and live to see the sun again so he could leave the estate forever.

Malcolm squeezed his eyes shut at his sudden tears of frustration. He just wanted to go home, to hear Sunshine sing and his mother complain and his sister laugh and to see his team smiling again. Why did this have to be him? Why his family? Why couldn’t anything about him be normal?

He groaned and forced himself to stand up again. He could sit there feeling sorry for himself, or he could actually try to figure it all out. He couldn’t do both. Malcolm shook his head and began looking through the attic once again. The drawers were empty, the sheets covered only furniture, and there no more skeletons in the closet. After what must have been an hour of searching, Malcolm gave up. There was nothing else there, nothing to help him find Gil and JT and Dani, and nothing to help him end the madness. The journal had led him there, but maybe he had been wrong.

Either way, there was nothing else in the attic. He needed to find Caswell and force the man to give him straight answers.

Malcolm moved back to the hatch and did as much of a cursory look around the hallway as he could from that angle. He then clutched the edge, dropped down to hang, then let go, falling the last few feet and successfully landing without getting himself hurt. Gil would’ve been proud. Malcolm didn’t bother trying to swing the door back up again. It was his estate, and if he wanted to leave the hatch open, then he damn well would.

The hallways remained empty as he moved back towards the spiral staircase leading to the front entryway. He glanced out the window as lightning flashed, but stopped where he was at what he saw. There was the spooky graveyard, as he had seen earlier, but as the lightning flashed Malcolm could’ve sworn he saw a man hanging from the tree by a noose. He stared, but when lightning illuminated the landscape again, the man he thought he saw was gone. Malcolm shook his head. Not everything was a ghost. Just as he was turning to go back downstairs, lightning flashed again, showing someone who was most certainly real. There was a man down there, outside in the pouring rain. It looked like he was tending to the gravestones.

Malcolm turned around and raced downstairs, running back into the kitchen, into the laundry room, and out through the back door in the mud room. The rain soaked him almost immediately. It was cold, colder than any rain had any right to be. But there was most definitely a man out there in the graveyard, and he looked solid - not like a ghost. Malcolm ran towards him.

“Hey!” he shouted out over the wind. The man jolted up, quickly making eye contact with Malcolm. His crazed grin was visible even in the darkness. He looked a lot like Caswell, but more disheveled, and not just because he was out in a thunderstorm. The documents that Malcolm had been forced to sign had spoken of two permanent employees. Was this the other one? “What are you doing out here?” he asked, despite the immediate uneasiness the man gave him.

“I’m Harvey, the groundskeeper,” he replied, eyes as wide as his smile. “I gotta keep the grounds. Surely my brother told you I gotta keep the grounds.”

“Your brother?”

“Hugh Caswell. I’m Harvey Caswell. Hugh and Harvey, Hugh and Harvey,” he said, barely loud enough to be heard over the storm. Of course they were brothers. That just made it all tie together like a ugly bow on a present wrapped with newspaper.

Malcolm was shivering in the cold. He needed to get back where it was warm.

“How about we go inside?” he suggested, jerking his head towards the mansion.

“Oh, no, no, no. I gotta keep the grounds,” he repeated. Malcolm cursed the estate under his breath. Nothing could be easy on the whole property, it seemed. “Oh, they don’t like that, Whitly. You better be more careful what you say.”

Like a reminder from hell, the pressure on Malcolm’s chest increased tenfold. It was happening again. Malcolm let out a moan with his remaining breath as the darkness encroached around his vision once again. Only this time, the darkness fully consumed him.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special thanks to my lovely beta for making this fic all it is and more. She's the best :)
> 
> ALSO: I didn't tag it, because I didn't feel that it quite warranted it, but there is some extra heavy angst in this final chapter that may be upsetting or triggering, but everything is okay. You can go down to the end notes if you are concerned and want to read the full explanation, which will contain spoilers.

Gil and JT felt a little bit better about it, having technically gone down the tunnel on their terms, but there was still nothing they could do. It was too dark to see anything, even if there had been something to shoot at. When they finally stopped moving - when they were seemingly allowed to stop moving - they were in total darkness.

“What do we do, boss?” JT asked him, voice slightly higher in apprehension.

“I don’t know,” was all Gil could say in response. It wasn’t as if he had any sort of training for something like this.

“Gil? JT?” a familiar female voice to his right called out.

“Dani? Are you okay?” Gil asked. He couldn’t see her anywhere, but then again, he couldn’t even see himself, much less JT. “Where’s Bright?”

“Yeah, I’m fine, something pulled me down here, I don’t know,” she responded. “Bright and I got separated, I don’t know what’s going on.”

Candles all around the room started coming to life, lighting up the darkness. Gil could see both JT and Dani. They both looked shaken, but fine. Gil could also see blood everywhere. Of course. It was a murder chamber.

The three of them were standing against a wall, unable to move. Just as Gil and JT did, Dani had her weapon drawn. But even if they could move, there was still nothing to fire at. There were various murder implements along the walls, all covered in blood and guts, but no visible threat. The three of them all had their weapons pointed at the floor, as they were trained to, but Gil couldn’t even move his arms up at all to aim anywhere. He would hazard a guess that none of them could.

“A door closed between us,” Dani continued. “It wasn’t locked before, but Bright couldn’t get out and I couldn’t get to him, then something dragged me here.”

Gil’s heart was beating out of his chest. Of course he was scared for himself and for JT and Dani, but at least they were right with him. He had no idea where his kid was or what could be happening to him. He had no way of knowing. If something happened to Malcolm, Gil wasn’t sure he wanted to make it out of that hell house.

Slowly, red words began to appear on the opposite wall, as if they were being written in blood.

_He will decide your end_

_Death comes before the sunrise_

“The hell is that supposed to mean?” JT muttered. Gil just rolled his eyes. The Whitly family and their theatrics were going to, possibly quite literally, be the death of him.

“Pretty soon,” Gil said regretfully. “I think we’re gonna find out.”

_The sun was beautiful as it rose above the trees. The brisk morning air was a sharp tingle that refreshed him with every breath. He - no, not he, it was Henry again, it had to be - looked down at the bound man at his feet, then over to his own beautiful wife._

_“She thought you deserved to see it one more time,” Henry said with a shrug. “I didn’t care either way.” Malcolm - Henry - looked down. The man looked to be in his early sixties, and he looked oddly at peace for someone who was about to be viciously murdered._

_“I just want to see my family again,” the man said. “Over thirty years ago you took my daughters, then my wife when she came looking. If only it hadn’t taken me so long to find out the truth.”_

_“Family is everything, isn’t it,” he pondered. Beatrice gave him a wide smile as she began to tie the noose._

_Malcolm tried to fight against it as he felt himself helping Beatrice to place the noose around the man’s neck, but just like the times before, there was nothing he could do. He tried to scream, but no sound would come out other than Henry’s dark chuckle. Malcolm tried to squeeze his eyes shut, but he was forced to watch as Henry and Beatrice lifted the man up by the neck, and left him to hang from a branch of the tree._

This time, as breath came back to him, sight did not. He was on the ground, taking in gasping lungfuls of air, but it was so dark, just like it had been in the attic. Malcolm could feel the ground beneath him, wet, but it was a hard ground, made of cement or concrete. He wasn’t outside anymore. The ground was wet because of him, because he was soaking wet from the rain. Malcolm was still shivering, and the cold ground wasn’t helping.

_“Malcolm,”_ a voice whispered in his ear, making him jump. He scurried upright, getting his hands and feet under him. It was still too dark to see anything. _“It doesn’t matter what you know, you will always be a Whitly.”_

Hands were on his ankles, pulling him somewhere. Malcolm tried to grip something, but there was nothing to hold on to. He tried kicking at his assailant, but the man’s hold on his ankles was too strong. Wherever he was getting dragged to, there was light. Malcolm could just barely make out the light from where they were going, revealing the man dragging him to be Henry - the other Caswell brother appeared to be gone. Malcolm would’ve given nearly anything for it to have been a deranged serial killer. At least he knew what to expect with those.

Even knowing it was a fruitless pursuit, Malcolm kept trying to fight back against the ghost.

“Let me go,” he muttered, instinct taking over. Henry just laughed again.

The light got brighter, and suddenly Malcolm was in a room lit by candles along the walls. The first thing he noticed were all of the various bloodied tools on the walls, hung up like some sort of macabre workshop. The next thing he noticed were the words seemingly written in blood, “he will decide your end.” The last thing he noticed was a gasp coming from his left. He turned that way, eyes going wide as he saw his team all standing against the wall. They all looked fine.

The hold on his ankles was released, dropping Malcolm’s feet back to the floor. Malcolm folded in on himself just a bit, a protective measure that he couldn’t stop, but quickly got to his feet once Henry took a few steps back.

“Malcolm,” Gil breathed out, clearly relieved. He tried to run towards the man, but he couldn’t move his legs. It was just like when he had been forced to sign those documents. It was just as terrifying to not be in control of his own body.

“What are you doing?” he asked, his voice shaking as he turned to look at Henry. “What’s going on?” Malcolm glanced back at his team. They were all staring at him in confusion. “What did you do to them?” he demanded.

_“Oh, Malcolm,”_ Henry’s ghost said with a shake of his head. _“This isn’t about anything I’ve done to them. It’s about what you’re going to do to them.”_ Henry glanced at the wall, then over to Malcolm’s team.

“What are you talking about?” he asked, his voice pitching low in apprehension. Malcolm had a feeling that he knew exactly what Henry was talking about. Henry laughed again.

“Bright, what’s going on?” Dani asked him.

“Who are you talkin’ to, bro?” JT added. Gil just stared at him with a mixture of concern and fear. Malcolm looked between Henry and his team.

“You can’t see him? Or hear him?” he asked, but he already knew the answer. Earlier, Dani hadn’t been able to hear the laughter of the little girls, or see their mother looking for them. They could only see the physical things that the ghosts interacted with, like the candlestick, the moving filing cabinet, and Malcolm himself getting dragged into the room. His team just looked at him with more confusion, and that confirmed what Malcolm already suspected.

_“Of course they can’t,”_ Henry responded, in a tone so condescending that Malcolm thought he was speaking to his father for a moment. “ _They’re not Whitlys. They’re not your family.”_

“Yes they are,” Malcolm immediately responded through clenched teeth. His team had come to mean just as much to him as his mother and Ainsley, and more than his father. Who was Henry to say that they weren’t family?

Henry’s ghost walked closer, but Malcolm couldn’t take a step back. He couldn’t move at all. The ghost reached out his hand and gently cupped Malcolm’s face, like a real great grandfather might. Malcolm flinched back, closing his eyes and turning his face to the side as much as he could to get away from the phantom fingers.

_“Look at me, boy,”_ Henry practically growled, his hand moving from Malcolm’s face back to its earlier place around his neck, right where the forming bruises were, but he didn’t squeeze.

“Kid? Malcolm, what’s going on?” Gil asked him, his voice tinged with panic. But Malcolm couldn’t respond with the hand wrapped around his throat. It got just a bit tighter as Henry forced Malcolm down, onto his knees.

_“Accept your inheritance,”_ he said. His eyes were dead and empty, yet they somehow held a raging, cold fire that chilled Malcolm to the bone. Henry finally released him, pulling his head down and making Malcolm catch himself with his hands on the ground.

“I’m never gonna be a monster,” Malcolm responded. “Not like you.” He shook his head, trying to get his breath back, but he couldn’t. The pressure on his chest was increasing again. Malcolm’s hand shot to his chest, as if there was some physical thing there that he could move to make it stop. He couldn’t stop his whimper as the pressure continued to increase and the darkness encroached on the edges of his vision once again. He would give anything for it to stop, for the visions to end.

Faintly, he could hear his team screaming out his name and metal hitting the floor as darkness took him over.

_“If you do this, nothing will ever be the same,” she said. Despite her imminent death, there was a fire in her eyes that scared him, just a little bit. He was still gonna kill her. He didn’t have a choice._

_“It’s nothing personal,” Malcolm felt himself saying with a shrug, but once again, it wasn’t his voice. It wasn’t Henry’s voice either. He’d never heard this voice before. “But you saw me, and I can’t let you tell anyone.” He shook his head, and cocked back the flintlock. That was what he had stolen in the first place, getting him into this mess. No one would have one but him back home. Then no one could ever hurt his family again. “If I let you go, I’ll get arrested, and no one will be able to protect my family.” He would do anything to protect his family, even steal the only flintlock pistol a hundred miles outside London and kill the woman who caught him. He needed to act quickly, before everyone had the gun._

_“If you do this,” the woman continued, stressing her words. “Then your family will suffer until you choose to end it. And you will never choose to end it.” He glanced down at the strange amulet she wore over her dirty clothes. The woman was a witch. Good riddance then, he supposed. She began muttering something in a language he didn’t understand._

_“I truly am sorry,” he said, and he did truly mean it. With a grimace, he fired the shot, and the woman fell, dead. As usual, Malcolm hadn’t been able stop it from happening. He glanced around, making sure that one heard him. There wasn’t another soul in sight. He took the body and slung it over his shoulder. He needed to get back to the white meadow._

_Blood quickly stained his clothes as he made his way back to his horse, pistol in hand. Guilt settled in the pit of his stomach. He’d just killed someone. Yes, he wouldn’t have been able to protect his family if he hadn’t killed the woman, and the woman had been a witch anyway, but maybe it didn’t matter. He had killed someone. He shook his head and secured the witch’s body to his horse. What’s done was done, and fate was fate. Some things just couldn’t be changed, only accepted._

Malcolm gasped as full breaths came back into his lungs. He was still kneeling on the ground, his palms digging into the concrete. He shifted his weight back to his feet and leaned back. That pressure on his chest was still there, but it was no longer suffocating. It didn’t bother him at all, actually. Strangely enough, Malcolm felt perfectly calm.

“Bright, are you okay?” he heard Gil call out, and he sounded concerned, but Malcolm couldn’t bring himself to care. He didn’t care about anything at all. Malcolm took a deep breath, closing his eyes. “Kid?”

“Stop calling me that,” Malcolm snapped out with a groan as he turned to look at the cops. Their guns were now on the floor several feet away from them, likely taken by Henry while Malcolm was being shown who he really was. He stood, glaring at them. “I hate it when you call me that. I’m not a kid, and I’m not _your_ kid either. I’m a Whitly, and my dad was right. We’re all the same.” They looked at him with a mixture of confusion, fear, and heartbreak. Malcolm just scoffed.

“This isn’t you,” Dani said, her voice pleading. “Bright, you gotta snap out of it.” Malcolm wasn’t sure he had ever heard her sound more scared, and he loved it, that he could make those beautiful brown eyes tear up, full of terror and sorrow, and he hated it, because this was Dani and he loved her and he just wanted-.

Malcolm groaned as a stab of pain shot through his chest, where that emptiness had resided ever since signing those papers. Someone was calling his name, someone who loved him, but something dark inside of him pushed that away and refused to recognize the voice. 

He was a Whitly, and that was all that mattered. He was going to kill Dani. He was going to strangle her. He was going to shoot Gil in the head and slit JT’s throat. That’s what Whitlys did. They were monsters, they killed people, and he was one of them. They were cursed, and who was he to break a curse?

He looked to the side. Henry was standing there, nodding approvingly.

_“Make your father proud, boy,”_ he said. Henry kicked one of the guns across the floor, towards Malcolm, making the cops all flinch at the sudden movement. Malcolm smirked. They still couldn't see him. Only Malcolm could see him. He reached down and picked up the handgun. The weight felt familiar, felt right.

“Bro, put the gun down, please,” JT said, imploring him. In the back of his mind, the part that Malcolm was forcing all of his energy into pushing down and away, he heard a love and care from the man’s voice that he had never heard before. JT looked scared, but beyond that, his eyes held something akin to heartbreak, and heartbreak could only exist when there was love. Malcolm’s hand started to shake, and that pain in his chest, beyond the pressure, flared up once again. Malcolm groaned in frustration and leveled the gun at Gil.

Gil was the one who had taken him away from his father. It was because of Gil that Malcolm didn’t grow up as a Whitly should. It was all Gil’s fault, and Malcolm needed to hate him for it. He could feel the cold, dead breath of Henry standing right behind him.

_“Do it, boy,”_ he said. _“He’s not your father. He’s not a Whitly. He tried to make you into something you’ll never be. You’ll never be like them. You’re a Whitly, you’re a predator, now act like it.”_ Malcolm flinched at the end of Henry’s words, his hand shaking even more as he held the gun up at Gil.

“I’ll never be normal,” he ground out through clenched teeth.

“And that’s okay,” Gil responded, tears in his eyes. “You don’t have to be normal, but you don’t have to be like them, either. You’re not a monster. I don’t know what’s going through your head right now, but I know you, and you are nothing like them.”

_“They’ll never accept you, they don’t love you, they’re not your family, not like we are.”_ Malcolm glanced to the side, and saw more ghosts than just Henry standing there. He saw Beatrice, and Francis, and people he vaguely recognized from pictures that he couldn’t put names to.

_“Do it, boy,”_ Henry repeated. _“Make us proud.”_

A breath coming from the opposite side of the room stole Malcolm’s attention with a gasp. The earlier calm was gone. All Malcolm felt was fear. He needed to kill them, the cops - his team - but he didn’t know if he had the strength to do it.

Another stab of pain went through him at the thought of not killing them. He let out a small whimper, but tried to focus on the other forms appearing. There were two of them. Malcolm recognized the apparitions as Jasper and Elizabeth, the grandparents he’d never met. They looked at him with soft, sad smiles. They weren’t grinning psychotically like Henry and the others were.

_“You don’t have to do this,”_ Jasper said. _“It doesn’t have to be you.”_

“I can’t end this,” Malcolm replied. He shook his head as tears filled his eyes. That part of his mind that he was trying to push back was desperately fighting, reminding him that he really didn’t want to do this, that this wasn’t him, that it was all just a supernatural influence.

Jasper and Elizabeth walked closer to him, Jasper resting his hand on Malcolm’s shoulder. _“You don’t have to end it. You just have to choose not to be a part of it.”_

Henry wrapped his hand around Malcolm’s throat again to pull him to the side, away from Jasper. Gil and the others looked on in confusion and concern, still not seeing through the veil.

_“Don’t listen to my disappointment of a son. He was supposed to carry on our legacy, not Francis. Just like it’s supposed to be you, not Ainsley. So do what you’re told, boy, and kill the ones who are holding you back.”_ Henry wrapped his hand around Malcolm’s, the one still shakily holding the gun, his finger reaching towards Malcolm’s to force him to pull the trigger.

“No!” Malcolm shouted, pulling away from the ghosts’ grip and backing away, gun still in hand. He turned and fired at Henry, the shot echoing throughout the basement, the bullet uselessly embedding itself in the wall. You can’t shoot a ghost. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” he repeated, hand shaking even more. His world narrowed down to just him and the gun. Maybe that was his only way out. He couldn’t hurt people, he couldn’t become a monster, if he took himself out of the equation. He didn’t want to die, he wanted to live more than he had in a long time, but maybe this was the only way to save everyone else. Slowly, he raised the gun to his own head.

The world erupted into noise and chaos. The ghosts of his ancestors shouted at him and each other, some calling him a coward not fit for the Whitly name, others screaming that it couldn’t end like that, and more just screaming at each other. His team was screaming at him too, but he couldn’t even hear them. It was all so overwhelming. Malcolm fell to his knees with a scream of pain and frustration as the cacophony raged around him. He held the gun there, too scared to pull the trigger, too scared not to. Slowly, one voice reached him through the discordant fog of all the others.

“Malcolm, Malcolm please, look at me,” Gil said, his voice pleading and desperate, but gentle and loving. How could Malcolm have even thought about killing him? How could he have thought about killing any of his team? He loved them so much, more than life itself. Maybe he really was a monster. “Kid, please.” Finally, Malcolm looked up at him through tear-filled eyes. Gil was crying too, as was Dani. JT was making a valiant effort not to, but Malcolm had never seen the man so emotional before.

“Gil, I can’t, I can’t,” he sobbed. “I don’t want to be like them, I don’t want to be a monster. This is the only way.” He shook his head vehemently, gun shaking in his grasp.

“It’s okay, kid, it’s okay,” Gil said. Malcolm kept eye contact with him, looking into his eyes as the tears streamed down his face. “I don’t know what you’re seeing, what you’re hearing, but I just want you to focus on me, okay? Me, and Dani, and JT, we love you so much. It’s almost sunrise, okay? We just gotta make it ‘til the sunrise. That’s all the instructions said you had to do, right? And it’s almost sunrise already. You don’t have to end anything. You just have to survive.”

Malcolm glanced to the side, looking past the arguing ghosts, towards the window at the far end of the basement. The night had been so dark that he hadn’t been able to see out of it at all, but now, there was a faint glimmer of light. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, and the sun was beginning to turn the clouds lavender.

Maybe Gil was right. Maybe it wasn’t his job to end anything.

“Bright, please, put down the gun,” Dani pleaded with him, tears streaming down her face.

“You’re not a monster, and you won’t ever become one,” JT added, his voice breaking.

Malcolm squeezed his eyes shut as the voices of the ghosts around him grew louder and louder. They knew it was almost sunrise too. Their panic meant that they would disappear when the sun rose, which meant maybe, all he had to do really was just survive. But he knew that if he didn’t do something soon, then the ghosts would decide for him. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see movement of the ghosts by the weapons rack. The ghosts were going to kill his team. His mind became clear as a butcher knife was removed from the wall by Francis.

“No!” he shouted, standing up to face Francis. “Let them go, or I’ll do it,” he said, keeping the gun pressed against his temple. “I swear I’ll do it.”

The cacophony stopped. A hush fell across the ghosts. Most of them moved back, away from him, except for Henry, who - still brandishing the butcher knife - took a step towards him. Francis did as well.

“Let them go,” he repeated. “If I die, you’ll never know who I could’ve been, what I could’ve done.”

“Malcolm, don’t-.”

“Let them go!” Malcolm screamed, interrupting Gil. He pressed the gun even harder to his temple, hard enough to bruise.

Slowly, Henry returned the butcher knife to its place on the wall. Malcolm didn’t move the gun.

_“I gave everything to you,”_ Francis seethed. _“You were supposed to be the best, with Martin as your father. You were supposed to be the greatest of us all.”_

Malcolm scoffed. “I’ve been disappointing my father for years, I’m not about to stop now.” His hand was shaking, but he didn’t move the gun. He glared at the ghosts, but he doubted his gaze held the same fury that he felt. The tears probably made him a bit less intimidating, but more unhinged - which was probably the more accurate assessment anyway. “Now let, them, go,” he said one final time. At first, nothing happened, so he moved his finger from the side of the gun to the trigger.

“Malcolm, stop,” Gil said, his voice slightly closer. “We’re okay.” Out of the corner of his eye, Malcolm could see his team moving from their former positions trapped by invisible forces against the wall. With a sigh of relief, Malcolm took his finger off the trigger and pulled the gun away from his head. Gil quickly snatched it out of his hands. JT and Dani and Gil were glancing all around the room, almost forming a circle around Malcolm. He could see the relief in JT’s eyes, and he could see the way that Dani was still shaking a little bit. He couldn’t bring himself to make eye contact with Gil.

The first rays of dawn began to stretch across the room. Malcolm could see the ghosts moving to avoid it, to stay out of the sunlight as long as possible. Francis and Henry were still glaring at him.

_“You’re still a Whitly, and that will never change,”_ Francis practically growled at him.

_“A Whitly has always lived under this roof. You’ll be back, and we’ll be waiting,”_ Henry said, his dead eyes dark.

“My name is Malcolm _Bright_ ,” he replied, trying to hold his head high as the ghosts got thinner and thinner, until they had eventually disappeared altogether.

_“You will always be who you choose to be,”_ another voice whispered through the air. It was Jasper, Malcolm’s grandfather - the only one who hadn’t killed, and who was killed for it.

Malcolm glanced around. The bloody words were gone from the walls, and although the weapons rack remained, everything else looked completely ordinary. He took in a deep, shaky breath. The ghosts were gone, and, he realized with a start, the pressure on his chest was gone too. He could take full breaths again. It no longer felt like he was being slowly suffocated. Malcolm needed to get outside, he needed to see the sunlight, to know that he truly had made it to dawn and his team was going to be alright.

“I need- I need to get outside,” he rushed out, then dashed towards the direction he remembered being dragged in from until he found a small set of stairs leading towards a cellar door.

“Bright!” Gil called after him. He could hear them all following him, but Malcolm needed to see the sun with his own two eyes. He burst out of the cellar doors and out onto the soft grass. The sun was rising over the trees, its light coming through the gaps in the branches of the hanging tree. The storm of the previous day and night had left clouds that turned the morning brilliant shades of purple and red. Malcolm breathed in the clean air, the smell of rain still fresh with every breath. He was okay. He was alive. A quick glance behind him proved that Gil, Dani, and JT were all alive as well. They made it. They were okay.

His eyes welled up with tears once again at the onslaught of emotion that he couldn’t process.

“Bright,” Gil gently called out again, resting his hand on Malcolm’s shoulder. Malcolm was still kneeling on the grass. Gil bent down slightly, and that was all the prompting that Malcolm needed. He launched himself at Gil, pulling the man down towards him. He wrapped his arms around Gil’s torso and buried his face in the man’s chest as he began to sob once again. As always, Gil immediately returned the favor. “We’re okay,” he gently said, almost in a whisper. He practically wrapped his whole body around Malcolm, as if protecting him from the house and all its ghosts. “We’re all okay.”

“You’re okay,” he heard Dani say from behind him, her voice breaking. “Don’t you ever do something like that again.” She wrapped herself around him from behind, and Malcolm moved one arm from where he had it wrapped around Gil to clutch Dani’s arm close to him.

“You almost gave me a heart attack, bro,” JT muttered, his voice coming from above Malcolm. He felt Gil move for a second, and for a brief moment he was terrified that the man was pulling away, but relaxed when he felt another body hitting him with a grumble, and Gil’s arm returning to its place around him, keeping him safe, keeping him warm. The other body was JT, whose added warmth was just what Malcolm needed to finally realize that he really was safe. They were all okay. They had survived, somehow.

Malcolm wasn’t sure how long they stayed like that, locked in an embrace with each other, but he wouldn’t have traded a single moment of it. Eventually, they all untangled themselves from each other, knowing they would never mention that group hug ever again.

“Wanna try to get out of here?” Gil asked him with a hesitant smile. Malcolm nodded, but panicked when Gil moved towards the estate.

“I can’t go back in there,” he said, his voice shaking again. “I just- I can’t go back in there.” He backed away, and took a few hesitant steps towards the side of the house. Malcolm could just walk around it, he didn’t have to go in again. He wouldn’t go in again.

“It’s okay, we don’t have to,” Gil insisted. He walked back over to Malcolm and swung his arms around his shoulders. “We’ll go around.”

“Besides, these flowers are beautiful,” Dani added, pointing to the black dahlias the landscaping was adorned with. She was also wiping desperately at the tear stains on her beautiful face.

“Tally would love those,” JT said. His fond smile helped to put Malcolm back at ease, but the mention of the man’s wife got him thinking about his own family. He pulled out his phone - which once again had full signal - to see a plethora of missed messages and calls from his mother, some from his financial advisors - likely wondering why several billion dollars had just been deposited into his accounts - and three missed calls from Rikers. For his father to have convinced the guards to let him use the phone that much was no small feat. Forcing back down his anger at his father, at the entire Whitly legacy, Malcolm put his phone back in his pocket and took a deep breath.

He startled as they rounded the corner and came face to face with Harvey Caswell, who was still dutifully tending to the landscaping. Gil held out his arm in front of Malcolm, as if to protect him.

“You made it, you made it, you all made it,” Harvey said, barely looking up from his work. “Now that’s just wonderful now isn’t it, truly wonderful, yes.”

“It’s just the groundskeeper,” Malcolm muttered under his breath to his team, just loud enough for them to be able to hear him. “I don’t think he’s dangerous, let’s just go, please.” He gripped Gil’s sweater, as if he were to push the man to keep walking, but he held on a few seconds too long for that to be the real reason.

They all scuttled past the man, who was once again humming to himself and taking excellent care with every flower and bush. Malcolm let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding when they approached the front of the house and the grass under their feet turned to cobblestone. He could see their cars up ahead, just where they had left them the previous day. How had that only been the previous day?

“Leaving so soon?”

Malcolm jumped as he spun around to face the source of the noise. It was Caswell - well, it was Hugh Caswell - and he looked just as perpetually unbothered as he always did.

“I think you’ll find that all assets have been transferred to your name, sir-.”

“I don’t want any of it,” Malcolm interrupted. “I don’t want anything to do with this place.”

“I’m afraid that’s not up to me,” Hugh insisted. “Your family has made it quite clear over the decades-.”

“My _family_ , is standing right here next to me,” he interrupted again. “I don’t want anything to do with the Whitly Estate ever again.”

Hugh sighed, which was probably the closest to rolling his eyes the man ever got. “Sir, I cannot change anything, but you can. You are the owner of the estate now, whether you want to be or not. It is yours to do with _as you please_. If you do not wish to, you do not have to ever come back here. That’s the benefit of being the owner.” He nodded at them, then walked back up the steps and into the house.

Peering into the mansion’s front entryway, Malcolm got a final glance at the portrait gallery, and, front and center, just as it always had been, was the portrait of Malcolm, the current owner of the estate.

Gil swung his arm around Malcolm’s shoulders once again, and steered him towards their cars. JT came up next to him, and Dani on Gil’s other side.

“Hey, man, you could always donate this place to the historical society,” JT suggested. “They love stuff like that, especially if it seems haunted.” Malcolm smiled. That was actually a pretty good idea, but an interesting one for JT to have come up with.

“And how would you know that?” he asked with a smirk.

JT held up his hands in mock defense. “I know people, I know things,” he said, but Dani just giggled. It was a beautiful sound. Every time Malcolm thought of the laughs and giggles of the ghosts of the manor, he would think of Dani instead.

They stopped upon arriving at their cars.

“I want you both to go home,” Gil said. “But check in with me, with each other, please. What happened here…” he trailed off for a moment with a sigh. “Check in with each other.”

“Sure thing, boss,” JT replied with wide eyes and a shake of his head. “Frankly, I just wanna forget all about it.

“Yeah,” Dani muttered, looking down at her boots. “There’s some things I would really rather not remember.” She made fleeting eye contact with Malcolm before looking away once again. His heart broke, knowing she was talking about him, what she watched him almost do. He swallowed around the sudden lump in his throat, but nodded nonetheless.

“Me too,” Gil agreed with a sad smile, then walked off towards his own car. Malcolm was about to follow him, when Dani grabbed a light hold of his arm.

“Hey,” she said softly. “I just want to make sure you’re okay, but I guess there’s really no way to be okay, after that.” She shook her head with a cringe. “I don’t know what you saw, but if you ever want to talk to me about it, I’ll believe you, no matter what. I’ll always believe you.”

“That goes for me too,” JT added from the other side of the vehicle. He had the driver’s door opened and was leaning against the car. “I’m here.”

Malcolm gave them a small smile, and was about to reply when Dani quickly wrapped him in her arms, holding him close. Her hair smelled like roses, the soft tresses tickling his face. He could breathe in that scent forever. After a moment, they finally broke apart.

“Thank you,” he finally replied, taking a step back to give Dani room to open the passenger door of the car. She smiled at him again, then slipped inside.

Malcolm turned around and walked towards the open passenger door of Gil’s car, stopping right before he crossed the line of estate property. What if he crossed it and found he couldn’t breathe again? What if it wasn’t over? What if he was still stuck there?

With a deep, shaky breath, Malcolm took the steps to crossover, exhaling in more relief than he thought was possible as he continued to breathe just fine. It really was over - aside from that slight emptiness in his chest, which had been there ever since he signed the papers, and didn’t disappear like the pressure had.

He slipped into Gil’s car and closed his eyes, just enjoying the feeling of breath in his lungs. He opened his eyes when he heard Gil’s sad sigh. Malcolm looked over at the man, concerned, but only saw that concern reflected in Gil’s own eyes.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, although there were so many things wrong that it could have been easier for Malcolm to ask what was right. Gil motioned to his own neck.

“What did they do to you?” he asked in a low voice, almost a whisper. Malcolm had gotten so used to the pain in his throat that he’d forgotten it was there. Hesitantly, he reached up to his neck, wincing when his fingers brushed against the bruises. He pulled down the mirror in the car and took a look. Just as he suspected, there were hand shaped bruises along his throat. They were still very red, but he knew they would look quite spectacular in a few days’ time.

“Would you believe me if I said a ghost did it?” Malcolm asked with a sardonic grin. Gil just sighed again.

“Oh, kid- Malcolm-.”

“It’s okay,” he quickly replied, remembering the things he’d said back in that cellar when he had been under supernatural influence. “I don’t mind it when you call me that, I promise. Everything I said, I didn’t mean any of it, I swear, it wasn’t me-.”

“Hey,” Gil gently interrupted, resting his hand on Malcolm’s knee. “It’s okay. I’m just glad you’re alive,” he said, his voice wavering almost indiscernibly. “And you’re always gonna be my kid, no matter how old you get.”

Malcolm smiled. “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” he said with a shrug.

After a moment, Gil gave a terse nod and turned his attention back to the task at hand - leaving that estate in their dust. The small pocket of emptiness in Malcolm’s chest remained, and it likely always would. He would always be tied to that mansion, to his ancestors, to what happened there. But that didn’t have to be his life. He didn’t have to be a part of that. He could choose his own path, fate be damned. So yes, that tiny void would always be there, reminding Malcolm of who he was, but as long as he was with his team, his true family, Malcolm would always know who he could truly be.

THE END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At the climax, Malcolm holds a gun to his head because he thinks that killing himself is the only way to end the curse. He doesn't want to die, not at all, but he thinks he has to in order to save his team. Obviously he doesn't do it and there's lots of hugs once it's all over, but it is a highly emotional moment that I thought warranted a warning here. I didn't give it a real tag because Malcolm truly doesn't want to die, and the context of a suicidal ideation tag would imply that he wanted to die. Idk. I thought about it for a long time and decided that a detailed end note would serve best for the purpose.


End file.
